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University Daily Kansan Friday, Sept. 30, 1960
An Optimistic Beginning
Nigeria, the largest of all African states, gains its independence tomorrow. This is the state that the British point to with pride — and well they might. Nigeria will not be jumping into something new tomorrow. Instead it will be taking on a responsible task that it has been constantly preparing for since indirect rule was established before World War I.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
THE MAGNIFICENT RELATIONSHIP Great Britain and the Federation of Nigeria maintain is something like a whooping crane — so rare it's almost extinct. This will be the sixth former British dependency to achieve independence since 1947, and never before in Africa has there been such well-founded optimism at the birth of a new state. Great Britain can point with pride to the fact that it is not losing Nigeria, but simply gaining a new member in the British Commonwealth of Nations. Nigeria can point to the fact that she will not have the trouble that nations such as the Republic of the Congo are experiencing.
The British are bending over backwards to see that its technical and diplomatic advisers stay in Nigeria until the country is securely on its feet. They have offered salary increases and advancement in the ranks of the civil service.
THE FEDERATION OF NIGERIA, its 33 million people constituting more than one-seventh of Africa's entire population, is located wholly in the tropics. It is situated on the west coast of Africa and is about one-eighth the size of the United States. The people are distributed among many tribes or tribal groups distinguished by
differing customs, traditions and languages. The federation is composed of three sectors — the Eastern, Western and Northern Regions. The Eastern and Western Regions have enjoyed self-government since 1957 and the Northern Region since 1959. Since the British started indirect rule before World War I, it has encouraged local leaders, mainly chiefs, to take on government responsibility. The federal system of government between the regions was set up in 1954. In May of this year, a conference was held between leaders of Britain and Nigeria. All concerned left the meeting with common ideas and goals.
RICHARD THOMPSON, UNDER-SECRETARY of state for commonwealth relations, depicted the British position after the House of Commons gave the final vote of approval July 15:
"This is the culmination of our work. We believe that it has been well done, and we look to Nigeria to provide a shining example to a divided world of the way in which the manifold problems of a new, emergent country can be tackled without bloodshed or rancor, and with forebearance on all sides, and brought to a triumphant conclusion."
There is little about the ceremonies celebrating Nigerian independence tomorrow to remind one of some of the other trouble spots in Africa. Nigeria has the proper foundation to be a strong, prosperous nation. The air of optimism in Nigeria seems to be justified, and this new nation may well play an important role as a bastion of freedom in the troubled land of Africa.
— John Peterson
Thanks for the Lift, Jack
More than 40,000 persons will flock to Memorial Stadium tomorrow and additional millions will be watching over a national television network to see Kansas' fast-rising Jayhawks, now fifth in the nation, challenge defending national champion Syracuse.
This is the third year Coach Jack Mitchell has been at KU and football fever is at the boiling point. Kansas has a chance this year for the most successful season since the 1947 crew which tied Oklahoma for the conference title and was defeated in the Orange Bowl. The game is a sell-out. with Parents Day and Band Day tossed in to give it even more color. More than 70 high school bands will flood the field at half-time and fill up the bleachers in the end zone during the game.
THIS IS THE DAY that Coach Mitchell has been working toward. When he came to KU, the Jayhawkers were little more than a second-rate football team. His accomplishments on the football field have been great, but that isn't where it stops. Gentleman Jack has given the University new life. Spirit is one of the prime requisites of a great institution. Not since the days of Charlie
Hoag, Clyde Lovellette and Wilt Chamberlain has the school taken such an interest in an athletic team.
Plans are being outlined now for an addition to Memorial Stadium. This has been one of Mitchell's pet projects, too. Last year many people said he was crazy, seeking more seats when the Jayhawkers couldn't fill what exists now. But Syracuse and Oklahoma are already sellouts this year. The advantage of big crowds is obvious. The added income means that much money can be put back into the different sports. It is almost a proven fact that results of athletic programs can be measured in money spent.
So Kansas will trot onto the field tomorrow afternoon for the first time in a decade with a chance to emerge as one of the great football teams of the nation. The credit for this must surely rest in the hands of Coach Mitchell. In his three years at the helm, Kansas has risen fast and many feel the Jayhawkers aren't near their peak. Regardless of the outcome Saturday, many people across the nation will know that Kansas has arrived as a football power.
— John Peterson
HOUSE OF USHER: VARSITY COLOR
Those who have read Edgar Allen Poe's immortal horror story about the tainted house of Usher and its doomed inhabitants will find little but keen disappointment in this picture.
Hollywood has laid a heavy hand on the master's plot and
Dailu Hansan
At the Movies
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NEWS DEPARTMENT Ray Miller Managing Editor
prose, and the result is anything but an improvement of the original. The special effects men have a field day; every door squeaks, the night wind carries little else but sighs and moaning, and the house itself is virtually unbelievable.
Miscasting is the rule rather than the exception. In the original story, Philip Winthrop is summoned to the house of Usher by his friend Roderick Usher, the last of the doomed family, who lives alone with his butler and his sister Madeline. The movie makers have seen fit to improve on the plot by making Philip a hotblooded if somewhat juvenile swain bent on retrieving his sweetheart Madeline from the clutches by her brother, played by Vincent Price.
Price looks more like Madeline's grandfather than her brother. In turn, Madeline, whom Poe painted as the frail and mysterious heir to the Usher curse, is played by a generously endowed lass who would look far more at home dancing the tarantella with a rose in her teeth than drifting down
The picture plods to its appointed ending in a welter of screams, squeakings and gore that is a travesty of Poe's matchless horror. At only two points does the movie rise above the tedious. These are the magnificent oils of the depraved Usher ancestors that Koderick shows his guests and the brilliant and terrifying dream sequence where Philip descends into the Usher crypt seeking Madeline, only to find the macabre Usher line gathered in ghastly festivity. These two presentations are green islands in a sea of mediocrity.
secret passages wrapped in a
clammy shroud.
If you like your horror unadulterated by imaginative acting or screenwriting, you must not miss this film. We expected something far more subtle from Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay and who bids fair to be the foremost writer of horror stories on the contemporary scene. His work, as well as most of the rest of the picture, was substandard.
-Bill Blundell
"IN CONTRAST—DURING 600 A.D. THE...DURING 600...THE..."
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, by Theodore Dreiser. Dell Laurel Books, 95 cents.
In literary naturalism Theodore Dreiser occupies the top niche. Several books placed him there, but the one that appeared fairly late in his life, "An American Tragedy," is most important. Now it is available in paperback — and it is not a condensation. That fact alone should endear it to professors of American literature.
These professors don't teach Theodore Dreiser for his style. He has none. Reading Dreiser is like a nightmare in which your feet won't move, and something evil is pursuing you. Dreiser plods, and you plod. But that's no matter. Dreiser is great in spite of himself, and "An American Tragedy" is both a special example of the fate of one youth and a symbolic example of the end result of over-emphasis upon material values.
There are several introductory chapters which show the nomadic life of Clyde Griffiths and his ne'er-do-well evangelistic father and long-suffering but God-fearing mother. Long before Clyde has embarked upon his tragic adventures among the rich he has been a Midwestern boy, learning how to get drunk and being impressed by the traveling salesmen and their fast lady friends in the hotels of Kansas City.
THE STORY NEED not be recounted. It is familiar and the excellent film version called "A Place in the Sun" (in many respects superior to the novel) has made it even more familiar to college students. But it is much more detailed than that tightly made movie.
DREISER, AS A PRACTICING naturalist, is pessimistic, fatalistic, amoral and deterministic. Or is he? One can't help feeling that Dreiser has a predetermined propagandistic position in his novels. He suggests that Clyde Griffiths is a product of society, that all of us bear a responsibility for him. So in that sense "An American Tragedy" is a tract, and it is difficult to forget that the capitalism-scorning Dreiser became a Communist in his last years.
If one regards Clyde Griffiths as merely a symbol then the youth has more meaning than if he is regarded as a victim of society. Taught little by his parents, except the literal Bible; educated in the jungle of the city; pushed too soon into a milieu in which he is out of his element, Clyde Griffiths places importance upon the wrong ones. In the vernacular of the 1920s, he wants to be "swell." "Swell" to him means flashy clothes and lots of booze and rich women and small talk.
THESE HE FINDS when he leaves the Midwest for New York, and these bring him to his doom. Roberta, whom he blunderingly and almost-accidentally murders by drowning, can be only a passing fancy. His ambitions are to wed Sondra, the girl of the idle rich. To achieve his ambition it is necessary to get rid of Roberta.
It is interesting to comment that George Stevens, in his film version of "An American Tragedy," created compassion for all three central characters. The reader does not feel anything much for anyone except Roberta. But she is dead, and Clyde, too, soon is dead, and it is Sondra who is left with nothing. Stevens makes the film viewer feel that the American tragedy concerns all three, while Dreiser obviously had centered the tragedy around the wistful and inept figure of Clyde.