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University Daily Kansan Monday. Feb. 8, 1960
Here We Go Again
Another semester has begun. It will be the last one for a few of us—at least we hope so. It's the first go-around for others.
We'd like to offer some advice to those who made their first trek up the hill to classes today. (Although if we've learned anything around here the past few years, it's that we're in no position to give advice.)
Just dive into this whirling turbulence of university life, and swim like hell. You may lose sight of a few things, such as weeks and days and your family and back home. Try to keep your eye on the dates for hour examinations, term papers and finals. They'll sneak up on you anyway, and you'll get caught napping. But fight it all the way and don't get discouraged.
When the pace slackens the first of June, you should have a few miscellaneous facts in your head, you should be a bit more grown up and you may be started on the road to becoming educated.
We extend our best wishes to the members of the class of 1959$_{2}$ , who now are out in the big
world hotly pursuing success and riches. We have read with remorse the first glowing letter describing the new apartment, the job and the friends. But we'll be there soon. Just four more months to go.
Fading rapidly is the memory of that tremendous load of papers to write, books to read and notes to review, which bent us to our knees just three weeks ago.
But we expect to be in the same old rut of lagging behind in our classwork before the week is over. We'd like to see that track meet tonight. "The Crucible" opens tomorrow in the University Theatre. The big basketball game of the year, with K-State in Allen Field House, is Wednesday night.
There's always something to celebrate. The boys celebrated final week, they celebrated the between-semesters break, and they celebrated enrollment.
Tonight it's a back-to-school celebration. Set up another round, Joe. Here's to the new semester. —Jack Harrison
Presidential Leadership
Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass) said recently that the question of Presidential leadership will be a central issue in the 1960 campaign.
The senator criticized President Dwight D. Eisenhower for do-nothingism and a lack of leadership. He said that a more active President is needed in the White House, implying that a man named Kennedy could fill the job.
Supporters of the President were quick to reply that Eisenhower had dictated to a Democratically controlled Congress in the past year, despite the fact that he cannot run for re-election.
These supporters fail to mention anything about the President's other six years of office. Despite the recent appearance of activity by the President, one must conclude that six years of comparative inactivity are not balanced by one year of vigor. Nor does one year of activity make
a leader out of a man who has many times said he prefers a "wait and see" approach to national and international affairs.
If this is Eisenhower's period of leadership, he certainly did not demonstrate it in the steel strike. The President finally took action, but it was belated. The interest of the public should have compelled him to take some active role in the negotiations early in the strike.
It is probable that resorting to the Taft-Hartley injunction, forcing the workers to return to work for 80 days, could have been avoided if the President had attempted to expedite a settlement. The President again demonstrated the attitude that kept him out of the Central High School crisis in Little Rock, A.rk., until the situation got out of hand.
Sen. Kennedy is correct. A more active President is needed. —Jack Morton
Editors:
Reading two bitter letters last semester from C. E. Cornell has been irksome and beyond endurance. Uravan schools surely suffer with this irresponsible staff member who apparently lays blame anywhere but on himself. My wish is that C. E. Cornell may learn to plan ahead and to quietly take the consequences when he fails to plan.
... Letters ...
The liberal policies of such men as Drs. Murphy, Albrecht, and Dykstra have allowed me to re-
enter formal academics, despite the skimpy B.A. in Psychology on my transcript. Here I was privileged with hours of patient counseling at the Writing Clinic, whose infatigable instructors deserve better quarters than the fire-traps behind Strong Hall. This understanding help has managed to ground some of my wordy, uninterpretable, abstract flights and has turned my verbal constipation into somewhat simpler communication.
Although the task of relearning
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
*WED LIKE TO CHECK, OVER TH' REQUESTED TEXT FOR THIS COURSE.* COOKSIN & I *TIRE AT HAVING TO CARRY A HEAVY BOOK*
Although it will have to be through auditing courses and more hours in the Writing Clinic, I hope to gain more skills in composition. Whether it was worthwhile to quit my job, return to school, and anticipate graduate study depends heavily on my clearly written thoughts.
was not easy, they helped me to the degree that I passed the E.P.T. on the first trial. Perhaps, upon leaving tile-crested Mount Oread, should my thoughts merit expression. I will be able to write them clearly in a form of English which can even be understood by "gobbledygoook" writers like Cornell of Uravan.
For having made this a brighter Christmas for me, here is my wish for the good Doctors and those weary-eyed readers of E.P.T. essays: "God rest ve, all."
How can I express my great unhappiness at having gotten you in such a position that you felt it necessary to write as you did in your Dec. 16 edition?
Editors:
Bob Krahl
Lawrence senior
I regret that you were embarrassed in any way. You are the only University of Kansas organization that has been ready to give a person a chance to express criticisms.
**
I wish it were possible for me to say that my criticism was baseless.
Perhaps it was too late to reverse the heated words. I accept the entire responsibility for my statements and stand ready to defend them.
Only God is infallible and on careful study I find him not listed as a faculty member. He is not writing this letter either, a fact well known to this writer as well as to the reader.
C. E. Cornell
Uravan, Colo.
Class of 1959
. . . Books in Review . . .
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
THE GOVERNOR AND HIS LADY, by Earl Conrad. Putnam's,
$5.95.
Here is an interesting biography of William H. Seward that really isn't a biography at all. It's a kind of historical novel that doesn't quite jell, a story that an Irving Stone would have jazzed up to get in shape for offers from Hollywood.
It never really sweeps along, in good romantic fashion, like an "Immortal Wife" or "Lust for Life." But it contains fantastically long (and improbable) passages of conversation; descriptions of homes and landscapes, and reproductions of interviews that seem so carefully recorded that one wonders how a tape-recorder was made available in the 1860s.
But intermixed with this phony mishmash are long excerpts from the letters of Seward's invalided and long-suffering wife, Frances. This is historical evidence. And to judge from the acknowledgments, Earl Conrad at least feels that he has approached his subjects in a scholarly manner.
Why "The Governor and His Lady"? This seems to be a touch for the best-seller trade. It's certainly better fitted for a paperback edition than "The Life of William H. Seward" or even "Seward: The Man Who Bought Alaska." I question the title because mainly this is a story of Seward in Whig and Republican politics.
Here was a born politician, smooth almost to the point of oilliness in his political dealings, but possessing a harsh, rasping voice, a slight build, and a W. C. Fields nose, none of which made him a physically attractive politician. But he excelled in the days of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, Benton and Douglas, and after the deaths of the great triumvirate following the Compromise of 1850 he became one of the two or three key men in American politics.
His background was western New York—Auburn, specifically—where he met and married the daughter of a local judge. She proved to be a wife almost as much of a problem to Seward as Mary Todd was to Lincoln. She was so overpowered by her father that she and her husband made their home in her father's home. She would leave only for short journeys, though she did spend some time with her husband in Albany while he was governor of New York. And she was in Washington, on a rare visit, when Lewis Paine struck that Good Friday night at about the same time that Booth was murdering Lincoln in Ford's Theatre.
To compensate for a wife who was still controlled by her father, Seward took a mistress. That mistress, in the view of Conrad, was politics. Seward loved politics, and he operated shrewdly in the political arena, from law court days in western New York to those almost secret sessions when he bought Alaska from the Russians for $7,200,000.
He was a successful, possibly brilliant, governor of New York, operating from a policy of liberalism in social matters and conservatism in economic—a good Whig, and an important one. He forestalled efforts of the state of Virginia to obtain New York Negroes who had aided a runaway slave. He showed moral courage in his earlier days in taking the defense of a clearly insane man, and he established the principle of insanity being recognized as a defense in a criminal action.
Despite the fictional touches, there are some passages of good history in this book—the "irrepressible conflict" speech that made Seward somewhat of a prophet; the Wigwam convention of 1860, when Thurlow Weed was unable to obtain the presidential nomination for Seward; the falling-out of Seward, Weed, and Horace Greeley, the three who had been fast friends since they established Greeley in 1836 as the publisher of the campaign paper, The Jeffersonian.
Conrad says, in summing up Seward:
“An exotic in politics, William Henry brought splendor, showmanship, and the magic of the genie to his performance. Sometimes, from his bag of tricks, there leaped a full-fledged fisco, but his failures appeared to set off his successes and to make them shine the more brilliantly. He was a master of surprise; and color, and the volatile elements of the unexpected and the unpredictable, were ever-present ingredients of his political broth. Bizarre, fabled, in his own time, he was more like an Oriental than a Yankee or an Anglo-Saxon. He was as a Turk without a turban, or as a dervish of East India whose swirls were political. Our most unique statesman.”
Dailu hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 275, business office
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
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Society Editors
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