Page 2
University Daily Kansan Wednesday. Feb. 17, 1960
Murphy and the Oath
We doff our hats to Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy for his stand on the loyalty oath and non-communist affidavit.
He said his own opinion is that the loyalty oath is "unnecessary and improper" in regard to student loans. He gave the University's stand as being:
"... the money is being given to the student on an individual basis. Therefore, it is strictly left up to the student to decide whether he wants to sign the papers or not."
This is only fair. After all, a recent survey of 379 KU students showed that 47 per cent felt they were not familiar enough with the loyalty provisions of the National Defense Education Act to form an opinion on the oath. The University should not refuse the NDEA loans with almost one half of the students not knowing "why." It would be equally unfair to outlaw the loan fund when 29.5 per cent of the 53 polled said they opposed the oath but believed KU should continue using the fund.
Dr. Murphy has stated the official University stand on accepting the federal loans is based on the individual's own decision. If a student feels the loyalty provisions of the loan are objectionable, he has to answer to his own conscience.
Technically, the loyalty provisions can be divided into two separate parts. The loyalty oath asks the student to once again go through the formality of swearing allegiance to the U.S. government. The disclaimer affidavit asks the student to swear he is not a member of a subversive organization or any organization "that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence or by illegal or unconstitutional methods."
We can see no purpose in the disclaimer affidavit. A card-carrying communist would not have any qualms against swearing falsely to the document. And who determines what organizations are subversive? The affidavit does not specify the organizations that are disloyal. Could we be convicted of perjury if an organization we joined today would become labeled as subversive tomorrow? The affidavit does not say. The state is belittling the individual by striking blindly in hopes of finding a few subversives.
There is another danger in having the affidavit. The federal government could decide to extend the provisions of the oath. It might read "are you now or have you ever been in a group which openly discussed Marxism? Or, equally as ridiculous, "are you in favor of recognition of Red China."
Our wrath descends upon the loyalty oath as much as the disclaimer affidavit. It is an honor to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag or blend our monotone voice to the music of The Star-Spangled Banner. Doing either is an American tradition.
But the loyalty oath implies that Uncle Sam does not trust the judgment of American youth. If we, after $15_{1/2}$ years of education, are not mature enough to distinguish communism from socialism or fascism or democracy, it is doubtful we will ever be able to make these judgments. Forcing us to give out allegiance so we can obtain a few dollars is putting patriotism on a material basis. We place our loyalty alongside any professional patriot in the American Legion. But we resent anyone trying to buy it. Loyalty is difficult to judge in terms of dollars and cents. - Doug Yocom
More Profound
Editor:
I know the two Cuban students who defended the dignity of our nation, although their manners were not well displayed. They told me a little while before seeing Mr. Dubois that they had studied the answer of the Cuban Government of the United States' note when Cuba protested Diaz Lanz's flying from Miami to Havana in order to bomb our citizens (two of them were killed and 45 wounded). This official pamphlet has been distributed to everybody who has wanted to read it.
I wanted to remind Mr. Dubois how warmly he was received in Cuba in January 1959 and to ask him why he has not reviewed his viewpoint about our government (all men can be wrong and can rectify their opinions), because our people maintain the same affection toward and the same faith in Dr. Castro as they had when he came from the mountains with the triumph of our liberty. But I was mistaken. Neither his attitude nor his reasons were able to satisfy the mentality of university students: this includes North American students who were also interrogators. Even after the meeting he showed to those who staved there with him, as one more proof that Cuba was communistic, a Cuban newspaper showing the Russian flag flying alongside the Cuban. This was the same flag that I saw flying in New York alongside that of the United States in the Russian exposition at the Coliseum. Now this exposition is in Cuba.
The natural attitude of Cuban students is similar to that of all Latin American students. They have had to defend the rights of the people, victims of the greatest ignorance and abandon. As I knew this, I recommended they speak clearly, slowly and calmly if they disagreed with Mr. Dubois. It was essential for us that others should know what is taking place in Cuba since most of the North American press does not reflect the truth concerning our situation.
This sad incident is possible because of a long period of defaation toward my country by the North American press.
Fortunately I also know other analyses of conscience by many North Americans about Latin America such as "Cry for Land in Latin America," published in The New York Times Magazine (Nov. 22-1959) by Chester Bowles, congressman from Connecticut. This one and others by Herbert Mathews, Ernest Hemingway and Waldo Frank about my country will save the honor of the United States in Latin America. These
I can understand the unfavorable opinion of some people concerning the conduct of these university students, because most of them are not interested in the problems of Latin America, and they ignore the almost tragic intensity of our problems. The only significance they can see in the reaction of the Latin American students is that of their manners.
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1839, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Fax 751, business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 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 Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Morton
Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Editor:
Douglas Yocom and Jack Harrison ... Co-Editorial Editors
As America is a country
men would have seen in the reaction of the students a state of Latin American conscience, a point of view so different that it has not been recognized by the United States, and which is fundamental to a possible understanding.
The chancellor's admonition toward one Latin American student, "You are a guest in this country," surely will be heeded by Cuban students and all Latin Americans at the University of Kansas. His advice on good manners has been taken as words expressed by our spiritual father in the United States. They also hope for the deepest understanding on the part of our spiritual father.
--where foreign students get scholarships and even jobs as teaching assistants to support themselves more decently;
Felina Ferragut Assistant Instructor of Romance Languages
Another Visitor's View
where everybody can say what he thinks and live in the way he likes;
where general tolerance goes so far that a foreign student can display his petty snobbishness in the Daily Kansan without causing much uproar;
where students work hard, do not boast about their own accomplishments and still think that studying and learning means fun:
where girls represent not at all the Hollywood type, as many Europeans still believe, but are smart and like to look neat;
where young people take their lives into their own hands and handle them quite deciently;
where adults and professors often examine institutions and society more severely and try more seriously to improve things than people do elsewhere;
I think our European visitor should pay better tribute to "European maturity." display better taste and show more intelligence in his judgement.
Ursula Schwarzkopf
stuttgart, Germany
Instructor in German
By Calder M. Pickett Assistant Professor of Journalism
A familiar phenomenon of the motion picture in America has been what Arthur Knight calls the "importation of art." Sergi Eisenstein came to America to direct a film version of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," but he proved too "arty" for Paramount. Hitchcock came in 1939 and began to turn out his slick and entertaining thrillers. Fritz Lang came after the triumph of "Metropolis" and "M"; his lone American film of enduring greatness is "Fury." Then there were the performers, mainly beautiful women: Garbo, Dietrich, Bergman, Lil Dagover and Anna Sten.
Certain critics of the film maintain that Hollywood waters down its imported artists. One of those artists whose work in America never attained the stature of his earlier work in Germany was F. W. Murnau. His "Sunrise," filmed here in 1927, will be shown at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow in the lecture room of the Museum of Art, as part of the series, "History of the Film."
"Sunrise" co-starred two popular favorites of the day, the western actor George O'Brien and the new romantic favorite Janet Gaynor, who soon would be stereotyped in a long list of saccharine entertainments. It was strange casting, for "Sunrise" bore little relation to the flimsy films of the 1920s.
It was based on a story by Hermann Sudermann, "A Trip to Tilsit," which describes a young peasant who is seduced by a woman from the big city. The man and woman plot to murder the man's wife and run away together. The wife becomes suspicious of her husband just as he realizes that he loves her and cannot kill her, and the two are spiritually remarried in a quiet cathedral setting.
Now the people who condemn Hollywood for ruining Murnau are most annoyed about this happy touch. To be realistic, they maintain, Murnau (or Fox Pictures) should have carried out the murder to its logical conclusion. Well, perhaps, but then there probably are many murder plots that are never resolved in real life.
Lewis Jacobs, who wrote the monumental "Rise of the American Film," is a bit more lenient about Murnau and "Sunrise." He praises, in particular, the roving camera, showing forest, city and lake, playing action against action. He describes lighting, pace, movement of actors, use of the camera to create dominant moods; flashes of trains and steamboats; the sensuality of the seduction scene: mists, dew, a full moon and always the sinuously moving camera.
So Arthur Knight regards "Sunrise" as "at least one-half of a masterpiece." The moral code had to be fulfilled, he says; the husband had to be punished, and so did the other woman. A sequence follows the spiritual reconciliation of husband and wife: the two cross a lake in a small boat, a storm comes up, the wife is thrown into the water, the husband searches for her in vain and then turns on the seductress and sends her away just as the wife is found safe
Murnau followed "Sunrise" with a circus story, "The Four Devils," which is best forgotten. He then collaborated, not too happily, with Robert Flaherty on a South Seas documentary, "Tabu." It was an exquisite but uneven picture. Shortly after returning to Hollywood the director died in an automobile accident. His "Sunrise" lives on, and stands today as one of the best expressions of the foreign artist transplanted to the American film colony.
The university president's job is to reduce chaos to disorder. Deane W. Malott.
Boasting is boring in any case; and to boast of things which repel others is idiocy.—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"THIS MUST BE A REQUIRED COURSE - MY ADVISER KEEPS TELLING ME ID BETTER TAKE IT IF I EVEN EXPECT TO GRADUATE!"