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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Sept. 19, 1963
What Would Bill Say?
For four decades, until his death in 1944, the editorial pen of William Allen White was one of the most pungent and powerful in Kansas, if not the nation.
WAW, as he signed his editorials, operated out of a small Kansas town, Emporia, but his audience and his interests was the world.
Reprinted below are what other, modern editors think, but we have often wondered what "Old Bill," as he is remembered in Emporia, would have said about Little Rock, Ole Miss and now Birmingham.
WHILE WE UNDER no circumstances would attempt to guess what the fertile mind of Mr. White would have come up with, we think there
is a partial answer in the last paragraph of a Pulitzer Prize editorial he published in 1922. It reads;
"So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will go forward, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold, by voice, by posted card, by letter or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
We repeat. "Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
— Blaine King
The Chicago Tribune
There is no mitigating circumstance about the bombing of the church in Birmingham, which caused the death of four little girls and injuries to 21 other persons. The crime was not committed on an impulse; it was carefully planned and executed. The bombers were not merely trying to scare people; the amount of dynamite used showed that the intention was to kill.
Worst of all, the victims were innocent children, and the scene of the crime was a holy place, dedicated to the worship of God. Only criminal insanity can explain such a despicable act.
It is to be expected that city, state, and federal authorities will employ all necessary resources to capture the bombers and bring them to trial. We feel sure that a jury in any American city, north or south, would give the guilty persons the punishment they deserve.
The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
Sunday's church bombing in Birmingham which killed four Negro girls and the rioting afterwards which took two more lives will shock and sicken the nation, indeed the world. Every effort, federal and state, must be bent to discover and convict the persons responsible.
Not that this will do anything to bring back the six who are dead or to comfort their bereaved relatives. But speedy justice at least may dissuade other warped minds that acts of this sort cannot be countenanced.
They have had little dissuasion in Birmingham up to now. Since 1955 there have been 21 bombings. Negro volunteers captured several white men after one bombing but they were later acquitted. So far, those have been the only arrests. It scarcely looks like a pattern of firm
law enforcement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told Alabama Gov. Wallace after the bombing that "your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and the State of Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder." Few would argue the point. In his persistent flouting of the law, the governor has indeed established a climate of lawlessness. He has a duty now to lead his state upward into law enforcement and obedience of the law.
President Kennedy has been urged to take steps to restore order in Birmingham. He can judge best if this is necessary. But Birmingham cannot forever be put under martial law. All of its citizens must recognize the need for lawful conduct and self discipline.
The Detroit Free Press
No one will ever prove that the murder of four Birmingham children as they sat in Sunday school would not have occurred except for the encouragement given by Alabama's Gov. George Wallace.
But no person who understands the workings of unstable emotions will doubt that the bombing which took the children's lives would have been far less likely except for the defiance which Gov. Wallace has personally given the law and lawful means.
The extremist is a fanatic bereft of the reason and decency with which most men try to work on behalf of their beliefs and causes. He is, indeed, a lunatic at large.
No sane man would dynamite a church at any time, much less during hours of worship, no matter which way his opinion might point in a controversial issue.
In fact no sane man would resort to violence of any kind except in his own defense against another's violence.
Not so the extremist crackpot, no matter on which side of a controversy his rabid emotions may lie. Give him encouragement toward abandoning due process and taking the course of events into his own hands and the worst will happen—murder, arson, riot and vandalism.
It invites these things, and more, when any individual indulges himself in the kind of sparks that can touch off the extremist's emotional instability, and put him into action.
A Nhu Twist
Particularly and greatly does it invite them when some person in the elevated position of a state governor furnishes the sparks with his acts, his assertions and the general atmosphere he creates.
With the elephant jokes still barely off the ground (Why don't elephants fly? They haven't been certified by FAA), along come the gnu jokes—or, more properly, the Nhu jokes.
No Nhus is good news has, of course, been burned to a crisp, though a variation comes along in a suggested headline on a story of Vietnamese censorship: No News Is Good—Nhus.
Then there's the greeting exchanged by people
meeting on the streets of Saigon—"So what else is Nhu?" President Diem's government becomes the Nhu Deal; Mrs. Nhu wears the Nhuest thing in clothing. Every few days our Ambassador Lodges a Nhu protest, but the answer is always Ngo.
Just "entre Nhu," it's all enough to addle a person who's trying to report the Nhus.—In the New York Herald-Tribune.
Bombed Out
BOOK REVIEWS
FAIL-SAFE, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler (Dell, 75 cents).
High on the best-seller lists for many months was this topical, exciting, perhaps superficial tale. Now it is available in paperback. When the book appeared last fall it became one of several to deal with a future war, Burdick and Wheeler hypothesizing what would happen if a single part of a single machine in our defense mechanism should go awry and start nuclear war.
The publishers suggest that "Fail-Safe" played a part in promoting the Washington-Moscow hot line. There can be little doubt that the novel, fairly or not, has played a part like "On the Beach" in getting Americans excited, possibly over-excited. It is a fast-moving, entertaining, exciting story.
SLAVE AND CITIZEN: THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAS, by Frank Tannenbaum (Vintage, $1.45).
Frank Tannenbaum asks some interesting questions in this little work, notably those dealing with the contrast between the legal and social positions of the Negro in the United States and in Latin America. He observes that in Brazil, particularly, the Negro is well-accepted, and that the color line is scarcely a social factor. In this country it is quite the contrary.
Tannenbaum notes that the Negro became property in the United States, property without rights. But the Negro in the colonies of Spain and Portugal, while low on the social scale, was a human being with some rights, and freedom was a strong possibility for him.
THE BLUE NILE. by Alan Moorehead (Dell, 60 cents).
Like its predecessor, "The White Nile," this is geography and history at its best. For Alan Moorehead takes a vast region and makes it come to life with a company of celebrated, shady, bizarre people, from slaves to Napoleon.
Moorehead's aim has been to provide a history of the Nile River in the 19th century, and in this volume he goes back to 1798 to start the story. So he tells of the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt that was both triumphant and disastrous, and describes the adventures of the Turks in the Sudan and the British in Ethiopia.
Dailij Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Mike Miller Managing Editor
Terry Ostmeyer, Trudy Meserve, Jackie Stern, Rose Osborne, Assistant
Managing Editors; Kay Jarvis, City Editor; Linda Machin, Society Editor;
Roy Miller, Sports Editor; Dennis Bowers, Picture Editor.
Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Blaine King ... Editorial Editor
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Bob Brooks Business Manager
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