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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 19, 1960
Religious Issue Brought Up Again
By Lyle C. Wilson
Sports Arena, Los Angeles—(UPI)—The Democratic Party has put the big tough question to the voters of this nation again—can a Roman Catholic be elected president?
This question was posed last in 1928 with the nomination of Alfred E. Smith, New York Democrat, to oppose Herbert Hoover, Iowa-born Republican. Smith was a Roman Catholic. He Iost. There were other issues, but Al Smith's religion was an angry issue in the 1928 campaign.
WHETHER SEN. JOHN F. Kennedy's religion will be an issue, hot or cool, in the 1960 presidential campaign remains to be seen. There is no doubt, however, that Kennedy's religion was an issue in the Democratic National Convention, mostly sub-surface, but it was there.
Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt raised it in her first anti-Kennedy broadside last week. Mrs. Roosevelt sought the nomination of Adlai E. Stevenson. In furthering that project, she warned the delegates that Kennedy's religion might cost him votes.
Persistently reported from Pennsylvania during the long preconvention shuffling was this: that Gov. David L. Lawrence, a Catholic, believed his own religion had hurt him when he ran for governor and that Kennedy might be equally handicapped.
Lawrence got aboard the Kennedy bandwagon despite these misgivings. His presence there helped Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson to raise the religious issue by indirection but, nevertheless, effectively.
THE ISSUE OF religion thus enlivened at this convention is likely to survive into the presidential campaign. Also likely to survive are other issues with which big name Democrats badly bruised Kennedy before he became their nominee and when they were trying to stop him.
The hammer blow most likely to sound throughout the campaign from the Republican hustings was struck by Harry S. Truman with his charge of a rigged convention and his direct question to the young man from Massachusetts: do you think you are ready for the country and that the country is ready for you?
The Democrats have raised the issues on which the Republicans could base their campaign against the Democratic nominee.
Crossword Puzzle
ACROSS
1 Deride.
5 Scrawny animal.
10 Leave out.
14 Single.
15 Clean the black-
board.
16 Ballerina Kaye.
17 Louise or
Victoria.
18 Scandals of 1923:
2 words.
20 Lively.
22 Of the nose.
23 Extended a sub-
scription.
24 General: Abbr.
25 Snarl; growl.
26 Caesar's war-
ships.
31 Headlong.
33 Fragment.
34 Oriental name.
35 Heroic poem.
36 Noblemen.
37 Cloud.
38 Load.
39 Lew of Hollywood.
40 Japan's chief city.
41 Show-offs.
43 Consequently.
44 Small island.
45 Chanerons.
46 Quench.
51 City just north of Detroit.
52 Seed of a billion-
dollar industry:
2 words.
54 Of the same kind.
54 Girl's name.
54 Reproach.
57 City near Carson
City.
58 Designer of U.S.
flag, 1818.
59 Star from Stock-
holm.
60 River to North
Sea.
**DOWN**
1 Of the upper
throat.
2 Namby-pamby.
3 Part of a leaven-
ing agent;2 words.
4 Titanium and
uranium.
5 English, Irish
or Gordon.
6 Summary of
principles.
7 Transvaal legisl-
ature.
8 Horned viper.
9 Rural poems.
10 Audrey Hepburn
11 Satellite.
12 Marie Wilson role.
13 Chinese weight.
19 At that point.
21 On vacation.
26 Spare —
17 C. G. S. units.
28 Harmless creatures, feeders on mice and rats: 2 words.
29 Vanity case.
30 City in Denmark.
31 Basil.
32 "Me-too" fellow.
33 Fish.
35 Canines: 2 words.
37 Limit.
39 Nimble.
40 At that time.
42 Secured with a fishing spear.
43 Set to work: 2 words.
45 Dizzy and Daffy.
46 Actress MacMahon.
47 Hernando or Pablo.
48 Isolated rock.
49 General trend.
50 Moroccan coast district.
51 Feudal benefices.
51 Lamb's lament.
Theater Troubled
The production of "The World of Sholom Aleichem" here calls attention to something that is happening in the American theater, something which this reviewer dislikes intensely.
It is the adaptation of material never intended for the stage while promising young playwrights go begging.
In a theater audience, I have spent an evening with Dylan Thomas and I will spend an evening with Mark Twain. I have glimpsed the world of Carl Sandburg and the world of Sholom Aleichem.
I have seen and heard a stirring rendition of Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body," complete with a banked chorus that produced sound effects reminiscent of radio.
I have sat through the Broadway adaptation of "Compulsion" through all the 40 some scenes required to tell the story of Loeb and Leopold in dramatic terms, producing an episodic highpoint beyond Bertold Brecht's most involved sagas.
These have been entertaining evenings, sometimes highly gratifying evenings, but why are adaptations such as these steadily encroaching on the domain of original playwrights?
Does this trend betray a poverty of talent in the American theater comparable to the poverty of Hollywood, where the mainstay has always been adaptations?
These may be the answers to my first question: The hard commercialism of Broadway, which prefers the tried and true (whether plays or not), the fragmentation in entertainment caused by the impact of television, and the widespread aversion of the American public to reading itself.
Someone might try reading poetry again—quietly, to himself—or reading Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" and "Of Time and the River."
Someone should say, it seems to me, that the world of Sholom Aleichem was his short stories, not the theater, and the world of Carl Sandburg is his poetry, not the theater.
Someone should question whether a string of short stories or the witticisms of Mark Twain should crowd legitimate plays off the stage.
To distort and stretch and pull and squeeze other material into some kind of dramatic unity, which is seldom achieved, seems to me incredible when 5,000 plays are written in this country every year.
Some of them must be worthy of production. Some of them should have the chance to be among the magic circle of 35 or so which reach Broadway each year.
New talent must constantly be encouraged. Otherwise, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and William Inge may be the last of the American playwrights.J.K.
OTIS AIR FORCE BASE, Mass.
—(UPI)—A large sign gives this warning in yellow and black letters to personnel leaving this base: "You are now approaching the most dangerous place on earth—a public highway."
Short Ones
---
SACO, Me.—(UPI)—A little girl tossed a bottle containing an appeal for foreign pen pals into the ocean here.
Some weeks later she received a reply. The finder lives in Ocean Park Beach, three miles away.
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
NEWS DEPARTMENT
News Room ... Phone 711
Editors ... Dick Crocker
Clarke Keys
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Office Phone 376
Business Manager Clydene Brown
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
FAMOUS AMERICAN PLAYS OF THE 1930s, edited and with an introduction by Harold Clurman. Dell Laurel Books, 75 cents.
If these five plays selected by critic-director Harold Clurman are representative of the 1930s, one must conclude that in American drama of the thirties there was a central mood, a theme.
Such a conclusion would not be far wrong. The 1930s were a time of depression, of economic and governmental unrest, of a driving toward world war. The playwrights, unquestionably disturbed by the times in which they lived, were seeking meanings and identifications. In all five of Clurman's choices one finds these themes, attuned to the 1930s. All five hold up well, and one or two of them may still make great sense 50 years from now.
THE PLAYS ARE William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life," Robert E. Sherwood's "Idiot's Delight." John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing" and S. N. Behrman's "End of Summer."
Here is a range from the proletarian protest of Odets to the high comedy of Behrman. All five seems to be saying, in Saroyanish words, "Man is an exalted being. He can, if he tries, make a better world for himself." All five suggest how such a better world can be made.
Start with "Awake and Sing." Odets places his Jewish family in New York in early depression. There is revolt among the young and the old, complacency among the middle-aged. The young are not satisfied with the world in which they live; the old are egging them on. Odets sends his heroine off into an extramarital affair, but that is her escape from the drudgery and dullness of a life of conformity.
BEHRMAN'S "END OF SUMMER" finds revolt among the wealthy and high-placed. His young malcontents are students at Amherst, one of them a daughter of the idle rich. His people can spend a lovely, placid summer at a beautiful home in Maine, but all the while they are there they are talking about the negative aspects of their life.
Sherwood's "Idiot's Delight" places his one-time American vaudeville hoofers in a European country on the eve of war. They are smart and glib—almost like the Sherwood lovers of "Reunion in Vienna"—but when the world comes crashing around them, as Fascist bombs wreck their civilization, they are protesting, and singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as they go to their doom.
Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" is in the proletariat tradition. His George and Lennie are bindlestiffs following the wheat harvest through the Midwest. They too are dreaming of a better world—a little home and farm of their own, where they can work the soil and raise their rabbits. Their dream is shattered, but it has been a dream worth having.
And Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" places a set of oddly assorted characters in a San Francisco waterfront saloon (almost, Clurman suggests, as a foreshadowing of the beatniks of 1960). Whether Saroyan is telling an allegory is not important, for once again there is a group of individuals who want a better life, and who in the hands of the always optimistic Saroyan are going to get one.
ELMER GANTRY, by Sinclair Lewis, Dell Laurel Books, 50 cents.
"Sinners! Elmer Gantry is coming!" read the ads for the new motion picture. Dell Books can be absolved of trying to find a sales link with the film. No mention of the movie appears on the cover. But the film is sure to help sell the 33-year-old book.
"Elmer Gantry" is a caricature. This may be one of the things that Sinclair Lewis purportedly told Richard Brooks, producer of the film, years ago. Lewis had learned this himself, with the help of the critics in 1927.
ELMER IS A monster. Compare him with the other major heroes of Sinclair Lewis. George Babbitt was a slob but a good-natured slob. If he did harm he never did it overtly. Martin Arrow-smith was a good man who only temporarily yielded to commerce. Sam Dodsworth was a booster who had very decent instincts.
Elmer Gantry is a stinker. And he knows it. He is the worst of all possible ministers. He has small-town boosterism in his makeup, along with a shallow mind, an itch for every curvaceous choir singer in the congregation, an instinct for popular tastes, a hypocritical desire to crusade and censor.
He starts as a drunken bum, a football star in a Kansas Baptist college. He becomes a Baptist minister, seduces the daughter of a deacon, sells farm implements for a year or so, and then becomes associated with Sharon Falconer (Aimee Semple?), a beautiful evangelist who is a sex-mad mystic. Gantry goes from bed to bed in his progress toward success in the ministry.
HE RETURNS TO more orthodox preaching, though he retains the techniques of evangelism, and becomes a Methodist preacher. He succeeds to one of the largest churches in Zenith (where Babbitt also lives, of course). At the end of the book, after nearly losing his position because of playing-around with his secretary, he is headed for an important church in New York.
This is the book for which Lewis did research in the Kansas city, the book that caused him to make his celebrated request of God to strike him down. It's the book that churchmen have reviled for 30 years, and that churchmen now are criticizing once again in its film version.
Sinclair Lewis never learned restraint. Had he ended "Elmer Gantry" midway, before Gantry became a vile Babbitt in minister's clothes, he might have succeeded. The book still is vastly entertaining, a book that makes one wish that Lewis and Mencken were still about, to play hob with some of the charlatans—especially those in politically high places—that abound in America today.