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University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, Oct. 23, 1963
We Must Go On
Two of the usual pre-election polls now have been completed and their results published for the nation. These two polls have clearly indicated that the Democratic Party has lost or is losing one of its most stalwart fortresses, the Deep South. According to the findings, Goldwater, or almost any Republican, could carry the South against Kennedy in the 1964 election.
Why? The omnipresent reason is, of course, civil rights. Kennedy has carried out a vigorous anti-segregation campaign during his term of office, and it has not exactly made him enamored of Southerners.
It is almost taken for granted that Kennedy will be nominated for a second term. He has been a controversial President, but he has carried out his office and reasonably well. He has suffered defeats and gained victories. Most important, he has carried out the law of this nation.
AMERICA'S UNIQUE system of checks and balances within three separate arms of government explicitly states that the function of the President is an executive one. He is charged with the responsibility of enforcing the laws as set down by the Congress and the Supreme Court. This is stated in the Constitution. It is part of the solemn vow taken at inauguration. It is the heaviest responsibility an American can undertake. Kennedy has tried to do this and, in the main, has done a good job.
Every President of this nation has at least tried to do this job. This nation would not still be thriving had not these Presidents enforced the law.
In the same manner, no President of the future can fail to enforce the law. If he does, then this nation will fail with him. No President must fail, whatever his name or party affiliation.
The makers of the Constitution stated that every man is guaranteed his rights as an American citizen. The Supreme Court has stated that segregation is a basic denial of human rights and is, therefore, against the law. It is now the task of the President to enforce that decision. This he must do to be worthy of the office, the responsibility, the trust that has been placed in him.
FOR SOME REASON, the South's voters seem to feel that if Kennedy is eliminated from office, some of their troubles will be over. The Negro will have lost an ally, desegregation will be slowed considerably, and all will be much better. Maybe the whole problem will be disregarded for another hundred years.
This is patently foolish!
The tide cannot be turned now. The Negro has arisen and demanded that he be made whole. Segregation is finally and irrevocably dead. It is no phoenix that can arise from its own fire.
The next President, no matter who he may be, will be as committed to a policy of enforced civil rights as Kennedy is. Every President thereafter will be committed.
THE SOUTHERNER will find no relief in casting off a Democratic tradition of a hundred years. The situation cannot change, because it must not. It is the law of the land.
No matter to what party the next President belongs, no matter what he says in his campaign speeches, no matter how he feels personally, he will have to uphold the law and, because of this inevitable conclusion, the civil rights battle will continue. If he should attempt to disregard his responsibility in this area, if he should shirk his duty, even try to focus attention on something else, then he will have violated the law himself. He will have violated the sacred trust 180 million people have placed in him. He will be unworthy to hold office and he must be impeached.
— Larry Knupp
Editor:
What State Missouri?
In what state is the nation's economy? In what state are the nation's morals? In what state is our political system? And speaking of states, in what state is Missouri?
The recent arrival of GEM III at the University of Kansas was considered by many people interesting but really quite uneventful. The GEM III is a Ground Effects Machine which has been made available to the Mechanics and Aerospace Department on a research grant from the Marine Corps.
In order to transport the GEM III from its former station in Virginia, it was necessary to obtain special permission from the various states through which it would pass. This permission was necessary due to the extreme width of the GEM III, about eleven feet wide, which would require certain precautions in transporting it on the highways. Virginia granted permission to transport it; Kentucky granted its permission; Tennessee granted its permission; Arkansas granted its permission; Oklahoma granted its permission, but Missouri denied permission! Just what is so alightly Godly about the state of Missouri? Was it beneath them to grant permission for transportation of such an important mechanical instrument? In what state of affairs are things in the state of Missouri?
Robert B. Miller Grantville, Kan., junior
Liaison All Wet
Editor:
The Kansan has done it once again. Several weeks ago you published an editorial saying that the Student Liaison Committee of the All Student Council was to spell an end to "Mt. Apathy." Since the editorial was incomprehensible, I am not entitled to comment on it.
You outdid yourself in Monday's issue, however. Now you charge Reuben McCornack, the student body president, with trying to gag the group with "red tape and influence from above."
Such makes a lively editorial page. It would have been much
The People Say...
more to the credit of your distinguished publication, though, if you had devoted a little thought to the issue, instead of rushing in with tommyhawk in the heat of battle.
The Student Liaison Committee was established to advise certain off-campus governmental bodies of the opinion of KU students on matters of concern to them. So far as I can see, that is all the committee is to do.
But in a display of power that would make McCormack blush, the committee's chairman, Jim Thompson, believes he was given a mandate to form a "do-everything" committee. The committee was first going to carry out its own investigation of the hospital service and traffic control situation. Someone finally pointed out to them that the ASC has committees whose responsibility it is to look into such matters, and Thompson agreed to let these committees work with his in the investigations. How sweet of him.
Yet clearly the liaison committee has no business whatsoever delving into such matters. Thompson claimed that the proper ASC committees were not doing their job—so his would. Well, if the Health and Traffic and Safety committees aren't doing their job, then replace the members of these committees. Or if that isn't good enough, then create a "Committee to Do Everything."
Defenders of the Student Liaison Committee say they—and not the All Student Council—are best able to interpret student opinion to convey to these outside groups. Yet
Dailij Hansan
111 Flint Hall
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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UUniversity 4-3198, business office
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Mike Miller Managing Editor
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Blaine King  Editorial Editor
Thompson is clearly going off the wet end. He envisions his committee as a problem-solving committee, while it was created as an informative body. The Student Liaison Committee seems to have abandoned the responsibilities which were envisioned for it when the ASC passed the bill and Chancellor Wescoe signed it. It's time Thompson and Company be brought back to earth.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bob Brooks ... Business Manager
Name Withheld by Request
For an example, take the controversy over Wichita University last winter. Had the Student Liaison Committee been functioning then, it might have decided that it should oppose the admission of WU to the state school system. Yet a majority of the student body might have favored the proposal. So while students would have gone to ASC representatives with approval of admitting WU as a state school, the liaison committee would have been in Topeka telling the Legislature that KU students were opposed. This didn't happen, but it could have and may, unless we begin thinking realistically.
what is more representative of the KU student body than the ASC? And whose committee is the liaison committee, its own or the ASCs? The ASC is justly entitled to tell the Liaison committee what to say.
Why No Memorials?
Editor:
I cannot understand why there is no visible recognition at KU to the memory of Professor Charles S. Skilton and Professor Carl A. Preyer, such as naming a room in Murphy Hall or framed portraits of them.
Mr. Skilton was Dean of the School of Fine Arts for many years and head of the pipe organ department, as well as a composer of national standing. Mr. Preyer was head of the piano department for more than 50 years, and a composer of international fame.
These two great men did much to raise the standard of music in the Middle West to the high plane it is today.
Mrs. James M. White Scott
Mankato, Kan.
Class of 1919
HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST
"We're Sure Overcoming That Old Reputation Of Being The Colossus Of The North"
BOOK REVIEWS
HORIZON (September 1963, $4.50).
The lush magazine of the arts has a dialogue this month of considerable significance. The theme is religion, and the dialogue concerns the belief of the Anglican bishop of Woolwich, England, that our idea of God is dead and has no meaning for 20th century man, and the reply from the bishop's superior, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bishop Robinson, the stormy churchman behind the controversy, says Christianity must relinquish myths begun in a pre-scientific age. He says God is not "up there" in heaven or "out there" in the universe. In a comment on the discussion, Douglas Auchincloss writes that the concept of God as "grandfather," or "Super Superman," or "Universe Tender," or "even as Catcher in the Rye," is dead.
This article keynotes a rich issue, which includes another topic that could cause a lot of discussion. Jacques Barzun deals with today's academic world in which professors must produce, even if what they produce won't be read by another living soul. Barzun views the whole process as a ritual, and a mighty expensive one at that.
A third article of considerable interest concerns the return of the nude as a theme in painting, even though the nude might be somewhat difficult to identify as a nude, as in a work by the late Jackson Pollock. Still another article, one that is particularly delightful, deals with the one-time "sun never sets" colony of Britishers in Hollywood, the Ronald Colmans and C. Aubrey Smiths and Clive Brooks, who have vanished with the British empire and who have been replaced by American Englishmen like Cary Grant and James Mason.
Other articles: a discussion of fabulous and unbelievable architecture represented in painting, the confrontation of Napoleon and Alexander I, portraiture on Roman coins, Captain Bligh and the question of whether he was martyr or martinet, Vittorio de Sica providing a document of life in Naples, dance forms in India, and cartoons depicting one man's view of "The Epic of Man."—CMP
* * *
A SEPARATE PEACE, by John Knowles (Delta, $1.45).
One of the most beautifully and movingly sustained pieces of writing in this country in years is John Knowles' "A Separate Peace." To this reader it is the equal of, if not superior to, "A Catcher in the Rye" as a perceptive picture of adolescence.
Knowles won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for "A Separate Peace." Its setting is a boys' school in New Hampshire—Phillips Exeter, we may assume, for that is Knowles' school. Its time is 1942 and 1943, when school boys all over the land were living in a strange world quite different from the world of boys two and three years older.
Its story is largely that of two boys, one of such deep, winning magnetism that almost with no effort he can control his circle (a type most students and most teachers will recognize), and one, the narrator, more inclined to follow, though he too has his qualities. Tragedy overcomes these boys who are living their "separate peace" as the world outside fights a savage war.
Knowles never resorts to sensationalism, though his boys are real boys and not prudes. They all seem quite normal, a condition that almost shocks one who has read considerably of late in Baldwin Updike, Roth, Styron and others who merit no more than John Knowles recognition as literary leaders of their time.-CMP