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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Sept. 23, 1960
Blueprint for Peace
For one brief hour yesterday, the President of the United States transcended his duty as leader of the West's strongest nation and stood as a titan before the world. He spoke not as our president, but as a leader whose interests span the globe, whose responsibility embraced every living human being. He was the man of peace for this short time, the goal which has so painfully eluded him for so long.
IF EVER A SPEECH WAS A BLUEPRINT for the future conduct of international affairs, his wns. There were few ringing phrases, little flowery verbiage. There were proposals so broad in scope and so farseeing that they overwhelmed in importance any such rhetoric.
Part of the President's speech was old hat—a repetition of his Open Skies proposal for disarmament, which calls for inspection of defense preparations and vigilance against further building of facilities used for warlike purposes. But though the speech, or this part of it, was a repeat of the idea rejected by the Soviets at a prior assembly, its logic and its strong appeal have not diminished. To hold out to the nations of the world a hope for a guarantee of peace through the cessation of the arms race was a master stroke. It reminded the world at this critical time that the United States still stands ready to make every effort toward peace. The USSR will have difficulty in rebutting the argument without marring their hard-won image as a peace-loving nation.
DESPITE THE HIGH LEVEL OF THE SPEECH, it effectively spiked Nikita Khrushchev's propaganda guns before they could get off the first shot. For a change, the United States seems to have felt the pulse of world feeling more accurately than have the Russians.
Khrushehev made a grave mistake when he noisily accused the Secretary-General of the U.N., Dag Hammarskjold, of bungling and unwarranted intervention in the Congo. Eisenhower pouenced on this mistake and unqualifiedly endorsed Hammarskjold's handling of the situation, an opinion shared by the Afro-Asian bloc. This was point number one for the United States.
The President also carefully avoided reference to Berlin and other cold war areas. The new nations of Africa want no part of involvement in the cold war. Point number two.
THE PRESIDENT'S PROPOSAL for a UN fund to aid new and underdeveloped nations will not sit well with the Communist bloc. Their classic approach to the seizure of power in any given nation has always depended upon chaotic economic and political conditions. A nation under the wing of the UN would probably be far less apt to fall into Soviet hands than one without this advantage. Also, if this resolution should ever be enacted in concrete form by the UN, the world will remember that it was Eisenhower's idea, not Khrushchev's. Point number three.
The bold proposal suggesting that celestial bodies be held "not subject to national appropriation" would be of obvious advantage to the United States, whose rockets do not yet have the thrust necessary to land large payloads on the moon or planets. This proposal also brings to focus the efforts of experts in international law who have been trying to untie the legal knots of national rights in outer space. Once again, if a proposal of this sort should be enacted, it will be to the credit of the United States. Point number four.
THESE PROPOSALS AND THE INTERNATIONAL tone which the President set in delivering them have placed the Soviet bloc in serious trouble. To oppose openly measures for peace which are obviously favored by Afro-Asia would halt Khrushchev's drive to recruit the new nations in this area; to permit their enactment might be worse.
We have not always agreed with the policies of the Eisenhower administration. We feel that there is some truth in the charges of stagnation in American government during the past eight years, and we entertain serious doubts as to the effectiveness of foreign policy during this time. But this much is sure; yesterday, at the UN, President Eisenhower was the leader we had always hoped he could be, at a time when leadership was needed most.
Bill Blundell
GRANADA; ELMER GANTRY;
COLOR
At the Movies
This screen adaptation of the novel by Sinclair Lewis follows the same harsh lines of social criticism the author uses in "Babbitt" and "Main Street." Raw, earthy, at times broadly risque, the film depicts the twisted career of Elmer Gantry, high-pressure salesman and later revival preacher by vocation, and an alcoholic satyr in inclination.
Set against the background of the Midwest of the late 20's, the story is a scathing indictment of the hell-and-damnation school of revivalists who picked the pockets of the faithful as they led them up to make a decision for Christ.
Gantry, played magnificently by Burt Lancaster, bursts like a meteor across the Bible Belt until his career is ended (temporarily) by the publication of pictures
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
showing him consorting with a prostitute. It is ironic that the pictures were a false representation of what actually happened. Gantry, who never let his religion get in the way of his enjoyment of the more mundane things in life, falls from grace at last, the victim of a simple con scheme.
"OK, IN TH' BACK ROW ~ LETS HAVE THAT 'GIRLIE'
MAGAZINE UP HERE IN THIS BASKET!"
The picture would seem a collection of wild improbabilities, too extreme and farcical to be true, were it not for the subtlety of Gantry's character; for while a good part of him is all that is worst in men, there is a side to his personality which leads the viewer to wonder: Is he saint or sinner, or what strange blend of both? We recommend you find out for yourselves. This film is worth it. (Also starring: Jean Simmons as Gantry's psalmsming partner and love interest, and Arthur Kennedy as a newspaper reporter who attacks revivalists.)
Bill Blundell
Dailu hansan
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Extension 376. business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
University of Kansas student newspaper
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 18 East 50th Street, United States 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 include second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910; at Lawrence. Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller Managing Editor
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill Blundell Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
From the Magazine Rack-
The South Will Climb
"But to accomplish the feat, the white South must first lift itself to a moral and intellectual level higher than it has ever attained, or than has been attained by any dominant race anywhere in the world. It is a formidable task. It is so formidable that the Southern lower classes — lower, even though some have millions and pedigrees of enormous length — have shrunk back and renounced it. But the lower classes have always failed in every great emergency, so Faubus and Eastland and Talmadge are not of any great significance. The men who will count are the saving minority, unbroken and unbreakable, men who can respond to a challenge after the fashion of sturdy old Pierre-Samuel, the original Du Pont de Nemours. In 1816, when a swarm of troubles seemed about to overwhelm the new republic, he wrote to his old friend Jefferson: 'We are but snails, and we have to climb the Andes. By God, we must climb!'
"The South will climb. A romantic illusion? Possibly, but a living faith at this moment, nevertheless, and one not destroyed by reports from Little Rock, or even Poplarville, not shaken when presumably sane men talk of interposition, of concurrent majorities, of the compact theory of the Constitution. For it is precisely by wrestling and overthrowing the giants of madness and despair that the thews and sinews of the South will regain their old-time power, endowing it with the moral and intellectual vigor to become again the great instructor in political philosophy that it was when our history as a nation began.
"I am a Southerner, and I wish the fact to be known; for the land of my birth is right now enduring the discipline that makes a nation great. So, in the midst of its current tribulation, I can think of it as 'my toilworn kinsman did, and can echo his chant: O fortunatos nimium. O most happy, land!"
(Excerpted from "To Live and Die in Dixie," by Gerald W. Johnson in The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1930.)
By Calder M. Pickett
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
The impressive talent of Anthony West that revealed itself a few years ago in "Heritage" still does not realize itself in more than talent. "The Trend Is Up" (a title that makes one wonder if it deals with something like space exploration) is a long, rambling, absorbing novel that is basically inconclusive and undistinguished.
THE TREND IS UP, by Anthony West. Random House, $4.95.
It might be placed just between a work like O'Hara's "Ten North Frederick" and one like Noel Clad's "Love and Money." Its theme is one that is growing to be familiar in our literature failure of the American dream.
Gavin Hatfield, West's hero, is a man of the 20th century, absorbed with success but finding that success is more than the making of a million dollars. In the depths of the depression, Hatfield, a New Englander of old and reputable family, sets out to become wealthy. He does so, in Florida (though the details of his acquisition of wealth are missing).
He marries for love; his wife marries for money. The wife, Ilona, is a monster who is capable of wild physical abandon but whose mind recoils from the sexual side of marriage. There are three children, all of whom drift away, to seek lives of their own just as Gavin Hatfield had done in the 1830s.
Florida is the logical setting for West's story of boom times in America. It might have been an even more apt setting had it been written about the real estate frenzies of Florida in the twenties.
The Florida of Gavin Hatfield is the Florida that has become more North than South, but that still has its racial problems; the Florida of artificiality and materialism, of great land ventures and big hotels and whiskey bottles adorning the skyline and young and old people living it up in the Gulf sunshine.
In this Florida, Gavin Hatfield finds that his world of materialistic values is one that readily crumbles. His wife becomes a lush, and eventually leaves him after years of loveless marriage. He himself turns from mistress to mistress, hoping that sex will be the answer to his problems.
There always remains for Gavin a beautiful and inspiring link to his past - a spring in the woods, which pours forth water that appears to have remarkable curative properties. This spring is the setting of his young ambition and young love, and he is disillusioned when he returns to it and finds that it has become a swimming pool for weekend visitors.
On his son's 18th birthday, Gavin deeds him the spring. And to his horror the boy, whose bent has been scientific, learns that the spring rests on a vast bed of sulphur, and the spiritual symbol, the link to the past, soon is desecrated by bulldozers and big industry.
Is Anthony West saying, like the southern agrarians, that the South of pre-industrial days was a better South? Is he saying that the primitivism of our past is better than the sophistication and materialism of our present?
His hero, Gavin Hatfield, actually is an extremely likable sort. One shudders at Gavin's wife, but not at Gavin. Why do the Hatfield children flee? Why does Gavin's life become a shell? West never really says. Perhaps Gavin Hatfield merely symbolizes our big business civilization and big business values that have petered out, despite the lavish praise of Life, Fortune, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
K Fi