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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, March 8, 1960
Docking for Vice President?
The possibility of Gov. George Docking becoming a vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket is becoming more likely every day.
A political party tries to have a presidential candidate from one area of the country and a vice president from another. So if the Democrats are looking for a vice president from the Middle West, Docking appears to shine brighter than a gold-filled tooth.
He has twice been elected governor in a Republican state. He advocates a balanced budget and responsible spending—attributes that look good on any Democrat's record. His is outspoken, and it seems to get him votes.
But, examining Docking on a day-to-day basis we get another impression. We do not look upon his resting on the Sabbath as any indication that he has created order out of chaos as Democrats 2,000 miles away seem to. If anything, Docking has contributed chaos.
Naturally we have a prejudice. Much of our opinion of the governor is a result of his crusade against adequate funds for expanding colleges and universities in Kansas.
The state would have a crash building program if it had not been for Docking's veto.
We are equally as critical of the governor's irresponsible remarks in public. A specific example of this is his recent remarks at the 5th District Democratic Convention in Great Bend.
In his speech, Docking defended his policy of fiscal responsibility. He pointed out that he did not cut KU's budget. He simply did not "increase it as much as some KU administrators asked for."
Docking said he approved salary increases
for KU's teaching personnel but not for its administration. Without nursing Dr. Murphy, Docking referred to one administrator who is paid $22,000 a year, plus a free house and a car, and "free junkets around the country."
"He's in South America now. I think he is getting enough. We can get plenty of others just as good, for less." Docking said.
This is an excellent example of creating political issues for use as weapons of personality bludgeoning.
Dr. Murphy has turned down offers from other universities and private corporations which were higher paying than the job of Chancellor of the University of Kansas.
Dr. Murphy has received international recognition as an educator.
His job requires direct administrative control of the KU campus and Medical Center. The Chancellor has as much or more responsibility than the governor. And the qualifications for chancellor are higher than qualifications for governor.
Every time we see this type of twisted, irresponsible statement motivated by petty professional jealousy we become concerned with Docking's qualifications. It should be above him to use a personal feud to gain a few votes.
Any politician that uses envy as a political tool will never have our support, whatever it is worth, for vice president. We can only hope the Democratic Party looks beyond a politician's superficial record when it selects a running mate for its presidential candidate. If they don't, they may find themselves with an immature politician who becomes an albatross around some presidential neck. — Doug Yocom
An Early Skirmish
By Jack Harrison
The first of the nation's 16 state presidential primary elections was held today in New Hampshire, with Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John Kennedy (D-Mass) hoping for some sort of gain in prestige.
The New Hampshire election is a closed primary, with Democrats voting only for Democrats and Republicans only for Republicans. Thus there is not an inter-party contest between Kennedy and Nixon.
But there was nevertheless a great last-minute effort by both parties to get out a big vote today.
Republicans normally cast at Jeast twice as many votes as Democrats in New Hampshire. If Kennedy could narrow that traditional margin, he would gain a feather in his cap early in the campaign.
A second name in the Democratic primary is that of Paul Fisher, Chicago manufacturer. He is considered only token opposition to Kennedy. The Republican ballot has only Nixon's name.
Gov. Wesley Powell of New Hampshire predicted that Nixon would roll up a bigger preferential vote today than President Eisenhower received in 1956. Eisenhower got 56,464 votes.
Much of the Republican interest in today's election evaporated when New York's Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller did not challenge Nixon for the nomination.
State presidential primaries are looked to as indicators of voter sentiment, and may start a bandwagon rolling or halt one that already has started moving.
New Hampshire's primary is always the first in the nation. As such it draws much attention from those who follow the events of election year closely.
In 1952 New Hampshire voters favored Gen. Dwight Eisenhower over the late Sen. Robert Taft. Taft had campaigned in the state
and Eisenhower was not even in the United States at the time. The primary victory by Ike was an indication of things to come.
In 1956 the voters cast a surprisingly large write-in vote for Nixon. This did much to squelch the "dump Nixon" movement.
There are two sides to the New Hampshire election. On the right hand side of the ballot is the presidential preference column. The voting for delegates to the party conventions is the other half of the election.
The state will send 14 Republican delegates to the national nominating convention. Twenty delegates will go to the Democratic convention.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
The delegates may be pledged to particular candidates. Twenty-eight of 37 candidates for the Republican delegation positions are pledged to support Nixon, while 36 of 45 Democrats favor Kennedy.
The candidates in the preferential contest have given authorization to have their names entered on the ballot.
"BOY, DID YOU GUYS EVER MAKE A LOTTA NOISE COMIN' IN LAST NITE!"
And the gap between Republican and Democratic total votes will be carefully watched for any indications of trends in favor of either party.
If Kennedy and Nixon win easily in their respective elections, the political analysts will have little to study. But there is a possibility of write-in votes.
UNIVERSITY
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1004 triviewey 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
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Served at the Press International.
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semester or $3 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturday and Sundays, University holidays,
association periods. Entered as second-class student in 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Morton ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT Douglas Yocom and Jack Harrison ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bruce Lange, Advertising Manager
John Massa, Advertising Manager;
Mark Dull, Promotion Manager;
Dorothy Boller, National Advertising Manager;
Martha Ormsby, Circulation Manager;
Martha Ormsby, Classified Advertising Manager.
By Stuart Levine Instructor in English
Large numbers of folkpots and faculty gathered in the Union Ballroom Saturday night to hear Pete Seeger, and Seeger put on a good show. He always does; the surprising thing is how varied his performances are. Saturday's program was a good deal quieter than the last one I heard him do, and his repertoire is so large that almost all the songs were different.
It was nice to see how big a crowd of folksong fans Kansas could muster. I wonder what our students think of him. The fans and the faculty, of course, know who he is. But what is he to the students who went to the concert just from curiosity? A museum piece, I fear, albeit an entertaining and youthful one—a relic of the bad old days when people saw simple solutions to complex problems. Naive. An Unadjusted.
Well, naive he well may be. Either he pretends not to know, or else he really can't tell the difference between sentiment and goo. But he can sing, make his guitar and banjo do what he wants them to, and charm an audience.
His songs were a good mixture of folk and folk-like. These latter are written for the most part by people (as distinguished from folk)—doggerel verse and simple tunes, the subjects often social protest or parody. Seeger must know hundreds, and he does them very well.
Might I suggest that next time some group sponsors him here a more intimate hall be used? Swarthout Hall or even old Fraser Theater would have been better because they're tighter and hence noiser and warmer. The audience singing was a little too timid.
From the Magazine Rack
Dreiser a Puzzle
"Surely one of the most difficult modern novelists to assess is Theodore Dreiser, whose reputation a half-century after 'Sister Carrie' remains moot—and whose meanings continue to baffle us. Perhaps the trouble we have is rooted in the fact that he is not a 'modern' novelist at all, neither the prophet of naturalism nor the pioneer of sexual freedom we have taken him to be, but the last and greatest of the 19th century sentimentalists, linked not forward to Sherwood Anderson but backward to George Lippard. Lippard, now almost forgotten, published in 1844 'The Quaker City; or The Monks of Monk Hall,' a book which sold 60,000 copies the first year and was, apparently, being bought at the rate of 30,000 a year when Lippard died in 1854, not yet 32 years old...
"In such a novel as 'The Quaker City,' the archetypal bugaboos of the popular mind—malicious hunchbacks, sinister Jews, hulking deaf-and-dumb Negroes, corrupt clergymen, and bloated bankers . . . Unfaithful wives are poisoned, the skulls of old women bashed in, the virginity of sobbing young girls violated; but nothing is presented as gratuitous horror, the staple of the less pretentious dime novels; all is offered as a true revelation of 'what really goes on inside.' In Lippard, pornography is justified as muckraking.
"Gangster and banker, clergyman and bawd, lawyer and doctor—these are presumably the real rulers of society caught off guard; and the nightmarish evocations of the book, a literal description of how the rich and their henchmen amuse themselves with the money they have sweated from the laboring man. This is the populist vision of upper-class life and the economic system which maintains it translated directly from private fantasy to fiction, without emendation or expurgation. Just such sadist visions taken as fact are what have compelled the grass-roots followers of rabble-rousing reformers from Bryant to McCarthy; but it is a religious fantasy as well as a political one, a poor man's apocalypse. In the small-town Protestant mind, the Big City is Sodom; and 'Woe unto Sodom!' says the title-page illustration of Lippard's novel...
"Fifty years before 'Sister Carrie,' Lippard had worked out a combination of sex and social protest in a style very like Dreiser's compound of conventional sentimental diction and colloquial speech. Whether or not Dreiser himself read Lippard's brutal exposé of Life in the Great City is hard to know; but certainly their books, making due allowance for changes in taste, are strikingly similar—parallel manifestations of a need in the non-genteel sub-audience for a revival of the seduction archetype, a hunger that even the endless reprintings of 'Charlotte Temple' could not assuage. It was in the '90s, after a half-century in which gentility had apparently triumphed over passion, that the 'fatal consequences of seduction' began once more to assert themselves as a compelling theme of serious literature. In 1893, a twenty-one-year-old writer called Stephen Crane published 'Maggie—A Girl of the Streets'; in 1894, Mark Twain's 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' appeared; and in 1899, Theodore Dreiser, at the summer home of his closest friend Arthur Henry ('If he had been a girl, I would have married him, of course'), wrote down on a blank page of the words 'Sister Carrie'—and wondered what they were intended to mean.
"In plot, Crane's book is the most faithful of all to the stereotypes of the theme: An innocent girl is seduced, made pregnant, cast out by her family, and ends committing suicide, while her educer is being victimized by the evil woman for whom he has left her. It is not even a Lady whom Crane has portrayed, but—in unconscious submission to bourgeois taboos—a girl of the people, an operator in a sweatshop, who lives on the Bowery..."
(Excerpted from "Seduction and the Class Struggle — I" by Leslie A. Fiedler, New Leader, Feb. 15, 1960.)