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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Jan. 12, 1961
Rally 'Round, Yankees...
SHADES OF OL' STONEWALL THE STARS and Bars and Mammy the chop-lickin' cawhnpone, the South has risen again!
No, no iron balls have thudded into the masonry at Ft. Sumter this time—jest a whole toteful of stories in our magazines that tell how the South could have won the Civil War. Fact is, stranger, you kain't hardly pick up a magazine any more without gifting told about how if'n this "if" had happened, they Yankees would have run farther and faster at Bull Run or else General Lee would never have had to give up his sword at Appomatox.
Not that this is 'specially bad—it keeps them Rebs happy, and it keeps the national economy from bein' based solely on cotton raising. But when a Yankee starts woofin' about how the South might have won the Civil War—and there are some doing just that—that's going a mite too fur. Fact is, them Rebs is skinnin' the pants of the North publicity-wise by gitting there "fustest with the mostest." And the way they're doing that jest ain't fair.
LIKE YOU HEERD BEFORE, STRANGER, they're using a whole passel-full of "ifs" to win the War. Fust of all, they create a sity-ation where Generul U. S. Grant falls of'n his horse, lands on his head and expires. Regardless of whether or not this implies that the Yankee can't ride his horse nohow, this deprives the Bluecoats of their leader, and the South wins every battle thereafter because a horse threw a generl. Ain't that something!
Tarnation, stranger, why should the South have all the "ifs" on their side! Maybe if n the North had some of them "ifs", it would have
whupped the South worse'n it did. Take fer instance the scene at Generul Lee's tent afore the battle at Fredericksburg:
The orderly gingerly shook Generul Lee, and upon hearing a moan of awakening, briskly said, "Generul, suh, it's oh-six hunner and the water's hot fer shaving."
THE GENERUL SAT UP ON THE EDGE of his cot. He rubbed his hand over the snowlike stubble brought on by not enough sleep and too many worries.
"Take that water away, son," he commanded.
"The North's got a general—Grant's his name—that looks like he never shaves, and he's winning battles same as I am. Think I'll try it his way."
"But, suh," the orderly pleaded, "if'n the men see you the way, they're going to be worried about you, thinkin' you is sick or something. Ifn't they think that, how kin they have any head fering Yankees?"
WELL, STRANGER, SUPPOSE THAT GENERUL Lee didn't shave and the fears of his orderly came true. And if'n that happened, suppose the battle at Fredericksburg was a turning point in the war. 'Course, that's if'n Generul Lee didn't have a beard in the fust place. You kin see that this ain't anymore ridiculous than Generul U. S. Grant falling off his horse and landing on his head. That's the way the South is winning all these battles in the magazines, though.
Now, ain't that ridicyious—ifn't you agrees,
stranger, why then you jest ain't a-whistlin'
"Dixie."
New Yorker Confused
Editor:
The other day I came to the realization that there was something about me that was different. It was not the way I talk, or the way I dress, or the way I think, but yet others seem to feel that this was it. I repeat my name, my address, my place of birth to myself . . . but wait, that seems to be what they were talking specifically about, my place of birth. I was born in New York; Brooklyn to be exact. But that’s foolish I think, Brooklyn is in the United States and that means that I am a citizen of this country and protected by the constitution and the bill of rights. Is not the freedom I took for granted in the East to be honored in the Midwest? Is not Kansas part of the Union?
I dismiss these considerations by reminding myself that this state has been part of the Union since 1861, a hundred years. But then why I wonder, are some of us treated as different when we are all equal?
I PLAYED AROUND WITH this question and to my amazement discovered that these same considerations must go through the mind of a Negro when he is not served in a local tavern, not given a job for which he is qualified, or not permitted to live in a place for which he is willing to pay the rent. He too must wonder whether the rights of being an American still pertain to him in this situation. But at the same time he too must know that as an American he cannot be deprived of these rights regardless of how differently others feel him to be. And he too might feel so strongly about these rights, cherish them so greatly, that when an attempt is made to hedge on the promises the constitution makes to him, he will stand up to these infringements with a simple statement of faith in his country and of love for its freedoms.
THESE SIMPLE STATEMENTS may take the form of asking others not to patronize an establishment that denies him his birthright, or picketing such an establishment, or voicing to others how he feels. What is germaine to all
of these is a belief in, and a love of the country in which he lives, and an affirmation of this belief in democratic action.
I wonder to myself that if this is the way I feel, and possibly the way the Negro feels, how does the Kansan feel? Is he too not jealous of these self-same privileges? Does he not guard his birthright and respond to any hint of its infringement? Of course he does. The rights granted the Negro and the New Yorker are the self-same rights granted to him, and he would feel the same as I or the Negro should they not be taken as a basic assumption of his life. The interest which he has invested in obtaining the full benefits of the Negroes' constitutional heritage attests to the fact that the Kansan, as an American, has a stake in the freedoms granted to the Negro as an American. These are his rights that he is fighting for and not only those of the Negro or the New Yorker.
Stephen S. Baratz
Brooklyn
graduate student
* * *
I hope you realize how your article of Jan. 9th in the UDK is going to affect the KU alums of Korea.
Kansan Corrected Editor:
Larry Sneegas did not say at the faculty children's supper Sunday, Jan. 8th., that the Japanese people were any more or less hospitable than the Korean people. The KU alums in Korea treated the cast of Brigadoon to a wonderful reception in the Korea House in Seoul, Korea, and gave us one of the most entertaining evenings of the whole tour.
Larry Sneegas
Lawrence senior
• • •
Ise Blasts Segregation Editor:
I see again that some of our students are leading the movement for justice and decency — against the restaurant segregationists. We are handcapped, hamstruck in all international affairs by the segregationists who give us our international black eye—or is it a dirty shirt—and this student movement represents not only fairness and
justice and morality, but the highest kind of patriotism. Surely there is no place in Kansas, the home of John Brown, for treasonable segregation—now more than a hundred years out of date.
All honor to these patriotic students!
John Ise professor emeritus of economics
---
Kansan Staffer Praised Editor:
I wish to thank Byron Klapper and the Kansas staff for the series of articles on the discrimination problems which exist in Lawrence.
As a member of the Civil Rights Council, I can only hope that these articles will inform the student body and other interested persons about what the Council is trying to do.
With the support of such organizations as the ASC, the KU-Y, and the United Presbyterian Council, plus the student body, I think there is real hope that something can be done about discrimination, not only downtown, but at the University as well.
I am also very pleased by the proposed resolution on racial justice to be voted on by the ASC.
Daily Hansan
Carolyn Shull Lawrence sophomore
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Extension 71. news room Extension 376. business office
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711 news
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 18 East St 50 St., New York 22, N.H. New service; U.S. Press International Society; 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 or after post office under act of March 3, 1873.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Paul Miller
Ray Miller ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Penneman and
Bill Blundell
Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull    Business Manager
"I thought you would never get here."
From the Podium
The Russian Writer
"Sholokhov, their greatest novelist, was brought here by Khrushchev, I think with the hope that when Eisenhower went back he would take Hemingway back to them. Sholokhov, so the rumor persists, was originally slated to divide the Nobel Prize with Pasternak, and I wish the joint award had been made because it would then have been accepted. But the moment they ignored the most powerful novelist in the Soviet Union and gave it all to the poet with one novel, it became a political award.
"What in fact will they write? The ones who want to play safe will write animal stories. Jack London is, of all American writers, the most widely sold in the Soviet Union—$8\frac{1}{2}$ million copies of Jack London's animal stories. Love stories in fur are not only a very safe thing to write in Russia, but everyone agrees that they are pretty good. Folk tales and fantasy are very much in demand and this, also, is safe because in this if you want to take liberties you can write double-talk. The art of double-talk in Russia...is an art. If you are audacious and want to go beyond any of these safeties, then you write fiction or poetry and you break out of this iron maiden just as far as you dare. The old ones dare quite a lot. I asked Leonov, who is one of their most rugged novelists and the only one thus far to receive the Lenin Award, which carries with it 75,000 rubles; he told me that three times in his career he was in hot water because of what he had written, twice because of his novels, one of them being "The Thief," and once because of a play which during Stalin's last years he was forbidden to put on the boards...
"THEIR THEMES, of course, are severely limited. They write about their defeat of Hitler because it is their greatest victory in Russian history, the most meaningful, and the one that hurt them the most. We have no idea of how badly they were hurt by the German occupation and how much more thoroughly the Germans beat up the country than Napoleon ever did. They published census figures when I was there last August which showed 55 per cent women and 45 per cent men in the sixteen Republics. My friends in the Embassy told me that translating this into quick terms indicated that the Russian loss of man power in the Second World War was even greater than the 15 million which they have acknowledged...
"ON BALANCE, what do you see? You see a people starved for many centuries, now more book-hungry than our reading public. There is no question about it, they are more hungry than we are, by and large. They have much more reverence for the poet than we do, they read thousands, hundreds of thousands of volumes of poets each year...
"There is no reference to racial injustice in their contemporary writing although you cannot travel anywhere in Russia without feeling the anti-Semitism. There is never a mention made of it, nor of labor unions. There is no enlightened criticism. You never see a person that corresponds to Elmer Davis. You never read a man that had Henry Mencken's sauciness and audacity. You don't have anybody interested in the preservation of the country with the thrust and drive of Bernard DeVoto. I could wish them a greater latitude. I think they have been given a little more of it recently under Khrushchev; how much more they may receive, I don't know. That they want it I do know..."
(Excerpted from a talk by Edward A. Weeks, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, at the Harvard Foundation Law School Luncheon.)
Worth Repeating
Most news broadcasts last five minutes. Of necessity they must be incomplete, if not biased. Give me a decent article, in a decent newspaper, written by an unprejudiced reporter who knows how to write, and I can read two columns in five minutes, and be much closer to truth and fact.—Joshua Whatmough