Page 2
University Daily Kansan Tuèsday, November 3. 1959
Pep and Iowa State
The decline of student spirit has been a matter of concern in these columns for some time. KU's pep clubs have worked diligently to rebuild the body of collegiate spirit which has been absent from the campus since the beginning of the "egghead revolt," many years ago.
Blame it on apathy, higher academic principles, increased maturity or really anything and you will still have the fact that KU spirit, as it once was known, is dead. Any manifestation of enthusiasm for football games, and other mass-participation schemes, is looked upon as odd on today's campus. Any instance of school spirit, when not prodded by alcohol, gives the impression of being little more than a facade resembling the dusty past.
Nobody participates in rallies, songs or even cheers today except the pep clubs. And the reason why they are not discouraged is because they are the pep clubs and everybody knows their job is to make noise. Somebody must. After all.
So it was with great interest that we viewed Iowa State's migration to Lawrence last weekend. Discounting the team, band, and cheerleaders, 500 Ames students showed up at Memorial Stadium. They paid their own expenses.
Iowa State's head cheerleader and president of the student Pep Council, Tom Kline, said the migration was "pretty successful" considering that the threat of bad weather held some students at home. Pretty successful considering... ? We are fortunate that Tom was unaware of some of our more successful migrations, when all of one or two hundred students participated. It would have been embarrassing if he had known. So we got away from him before he asked.
But Tom did hint as to what helps Iowa State's successful pep program. His school's pep clubs receive three cents per dollar from each student's activity fees. That gives them better than $2,500 to spend each year.
The KU pep clubs' funds are distributed from the All Student Council treasury. This year the council gave them $495. Now this is not to say that the council should have given the pep clubs more money. Nor are we asserting that pep clubs are important.
But it sure was nice to watch those Iowa State students last Saturday. They gave the impression they were proud of their school.
John Husar
An Editorial Feature
Inside Red China
By Saundra Hayn
Is the commune system in China like the conditions described in Orwell's "1984?" This easily might be a question Albert Ravenholt will answer this week.
Mr. Ravenholt's writings and versities Field Staff speaker, is an expert on the Far East, including China. He will visit classes and speak here for 10 days.
Mr. Ravenholdt's writings and other recent articles on Red China present the following picture of that country's internal development.
The commune system is the one ideological invention Communist China can offer the Soviet Union if a conflict should evolve. If this system continues to work effectively it will be an example to all of Asia that her most valuable unused resource, manpower, can be effectively utilized.
In place of these values the Chinese are learning to dig up graves and use coffin boards for fences, to respect not mental effort, but only physical labor, as a symbol with meaning, to take all their personal problems to the people's meetings, and to become strong.
The commune system embodies a new way of life for the Chinese peasant. Traditional Chinese values, such as filial loyalty, ancestor veneration, and intellectual esteem are disappearing.
Worker Is Regimented
The Chinese farmer, as a member of a commune, is the world's most regimented worker.
He awakens to a bell, after being allowed a maximum of eight hours sleep. Next the worker is required to do his morning calisthenics as a way of hardening himself for labor. He then goes to breakfast in a commune mall where all his meals are taken. This helps weaken family ties.
The worker next reports to his "platoon" for work. His labor is constantly supervised and his platoon competes with the others in "labor emulation drives." Sometimes the prospect of having meat twice a month is added as a working incentive.
The worker is allowed four hours each day for his personal life. Children under the age of nine years are forbidden to work all day in the
fields and are required to attend four hours of class each day.
Agriculture Buildup
The goal for commune organization is to engage 90 per cent of commune manpower in agriculture. In the 1957 "leap forward" campaign the Communists claim that irrigation was extended 80 million acres and that 66 million acres of mountainous land was reforested.
Chinese women have more freedom now than before. The Communists remove the women from the home so they can work for the good of the "whole" society. They vote and have marriage and divorce privileges. The children are
cared for in a commune nursery. The child is the responsibility of the state. Eventually, all Chinese children will be placed in boarding schools until they reach working age. A select few will be sent to Russia for higher education. In the past seven years, 7,000 Chinese have been sent to Russia.
Women no longer are needed to cook in the home. They may work in the fields under the platoon system or they may belong to the sewing, cooking, or nursery staffs.
cared for in a commune nurserv.
This is the China of today. How has it happened? The best explanation is that Mao Tse-tung and his government have given the Chinese people things they never had before.
Mao Raised Standards
He has given the people a high degree of unity, peace and order. True, all this is embodied in commune regimentation but now the people are working for themselves, not trying to repel an invader. His is the least financially corrupt and probably the most efficient administration that China has known for decades.
Mao has restored the Chinese sense of national progress through the use of propaganda. This control technique is probably the primary ingredient in the future success of the Communist plan. Everywhere in China loudspeakers blast out party slogans. Campaigns are ever present factors in daily life, "Shock," "immense vitality," "leap forward," and "volunteering" are only a few. These are the words by which the Chinese now live.
Daily Hansan
Are the people unhappy with this system? Yes, they naturally miss traditional values, and some are having difficulty adjusting to the new way of life. But it is doubtful that they will rebel. The Chinese people are better off than they have been for years. As long as Mao Tse-tung's regime can convince them through propaganda that they are part of an "irresistable" movement toward progress, the commune system with all of its inhuman implications will continue.
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone VIking 3-2700
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
Managing Editor
Jack Harrison
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George DeBord and John Husar ... Co-Editorial Editors
Satindra Hayn. Associate Editorial Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Manager
Bill Kane
Effective Dictatorship
In several thousand years of autocratic government the Chinese people never have experienced so effective and all-pervasive a dictatorship as that of the Communists today. There are now about 55 million peasants living in Peoples' communes.
In 10 short years, the Chinese Communists have overturned one of the world's most homogeneous and finely-structured cultures.
In view of the past decade, it looks as if a "new" China has been created. As long as Mao can keep harmony within his party, "new" China will continue to be a living example of regimented party members—just like Orwell predicted.
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
AMERICAN HERITAGE, October, 1959. $2.95.
The publicity release from American Heritage suggests that the most significant article in this new volume is a just-discovered diary of Fanny Seward which describes the attempted assassination of her Secretary of State father in 1865. That was the tragic night of Good Friday, when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, and Lewis Powell, one of Booth's fellow conspirators, severely wounded William H. Seward.
THIS DIARY is exciting, and is a significant document. But for this reader the article entitled "The War to End War" is the best reading in the magazine. It is by Laurence Stallings, who is 35 years ago collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on "What Price Glory?" Stallings knows World War I, and he includes some poignant and revealing data.
It was a war which, in terms of materiel and training, wasn't much more advanced than the Civil War. It was a war of fighting in the trenches, when a few yards gained was a great military victory. It was a war for democracy, a war when soldiers sang of "K-K-K-Katy," but soon sang of a more risque lady, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres." Stallings tells how his first platoon sang the many ribald verses about the mademoiselle, one day shouting them out as the boys marched past a tea party being given by their battalion commander.
ACCOMPANYING STALLINGS' nostalgic account are paintings and posters, the sort of art in which American Heritage has come to excel. Here are doughboys, propaganda urging the canning of vegetables to help defeat the Kaiser, signs showing the Hun in the rape of Belgium, paintings of prisoners of war, generals, the battle of Chateau-Thierry, and the French Blue Devils striding down Fifth Avenue.
Another article that contains memorable history is Peter Lyon's "The Herald Angels of Woman's Rights." This is the story of the warm and cheerful Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her spare, stern spinster friend, Susan B. Anthony, who fought a century ago for the vote, neither living to see any more than just a handful of women (in four western states) exercise the suffrage.
THEY WERE TOUGH old girls, as they had to be in those days, when their rights were little more than those of a slave, when Father could beat them, schools could deny them admission, and medical colleges could scorn them when they had the gall to seek to enroll for careers as doctors.
American Heritage this month also tells of a Revolutionary War hero of such amazing exploits that he seems almost a Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. He was "Francisco the Incredible," who fought at Brandywine, Germantown, Mifflin, Monmouth, Stony Point, Camden and Guilford, and killed more Redcoats than anyone else in the army.
OTHER ARTICLES in brief:
"Ferryboats," is the story of a bygone age in New York; "Edison: Last Days of the Wizard," an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Matthew Josephson that shows considerable promise; "Timid President? Futile War?," a defense by Irving Brant of James Madison and his conduct of the War of 1812; "Pilgrims and Puritans," the fourth part of a series on the Elizabethans and America; "The Ultimate Courage of Jean de Brebeuf," the story of a heroic Catholic missionary to the Indians; and "The Carondelet Runs the Gantlet," the story of a sea battle during the Civil War.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler