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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 7, 1950
Appeasement in Our Time
Let's attend the opening night of a prize-winning historical play.
Act. I. Munich-Czechoslovakia. Hitler said he wanted peace. Yes, he certainly did—but he spelled it "piece." A piece of that country and a piece of that country and a piece of that country. And we gave him "piece."
The appetite is whetted, not satisfied by appeasement. "As soon as an inch is granted, a mile will be demanded."
Act II. Yalta-Poland. Thinking to avoid war, President Roosevelt made major concessions to the Reds. Appeasement as the avoidance of war doesn't appease. Can we not avoid war and still preserve our national honor?
Act III. Geneva-Berlin. What did Khrushchev (Gromyko) get? The possibility of a summit
meeting? The sheepish appeasement is often dressed in the wolf's clothing of "meeting the person half-way."
The curtain falls. What will the critics say?
There is an answer. A firm refusal should be the answer—instead of obedience to demands.
We may sometime learn that dictators cannot be appeased because their ideals and procedures are so often denied for the sake of getting into power.
Those who want appeasement (under whatever term they place it) can be recognized. "Give in to them on this point because then there will be no war." The contrary may be true, as history has shown.
There simply is no peace in appeasement.
Bilking The Public
Fast-talking sharpies have come up with a new crop of schemes to bilk the gullible, the Reader's Digest has reported. To protect ourselves—and stamp out the crooks—we must report attempted frauds or deceptions to the police or other authorities. A nationwide survey of Better Business Bureaus reports these "Five Swindles to Watch Out For."
1. Blank contracts. Some people who wouldn't dream of signing a blank check, Wharton says, apparently can't resist a fast-talking salesman who says "just sign these papers and the car is yours; we'll fill in the details when the secretary gets in tomorrow." Those "details" often add up to several hundred dollars overcharge.
2. Contests and credit checks. Many hard-sell merchants hold ridiculously easy "contests" in which every entrant "wins" second prize—a "credit check" for say, $50. This entitles him to $50 on some item which has been marked up $50 in price.
3. Gyp correspondence courses. They often employ high-pressure salesmen who pose as "registrars" and falsely promise to refund the student's money if he doesn't get a big job. One school is selling a $295 course to girls who want to become airline hostesses. Most major airlines train their own hostesses at the airlines expense.
4. The "Business Opportunity." Often, this is a scheme to sell vending machines at three or four times their value, through advertisements offering $400 to $500 a month for a few hours' work a week, as a "Supervisor" or "Route Manager."
5. Drug and cosmetic frauds. The Better Business Bureau gets ten times as many complaints about these as it did two years ago. One great hoax is the "royal jelly" capsule and cosmetic campaign. The jelly may be extremely nourishing for a queen bee, but it does nothing whatever for humans-except those who sell it.
Daily Crossword
—Farmington (Mo.) Press
ACROSS
1 Inexpensive.
2 Salamander.
10 noire
(bugbear).
15 Shilly-shally.
16 Swiff river.
15 Duce-Fuchrer comrade.
17 Rag-to-tiches exponent.
18 Notice; Colloq.
20 Dreams on paper.
21 Winged.
22 Born.
23 Combat missions by planes.
25 School paper.
27 Price cut.
29 Sensational.
32 Catch up with.
32 Shaped like an ancient harp.
37 Plunge.
38 Tax of a tenth.
39 Solar disk.
41 Unwilling.
43 Kitchen appliances.
45 Abraham's wife.
46 Veranda.
47 Fairy-tale dwarf.
49 Olympic field event.
54 A flair for pitch.
16 Reading Gaol poet.
Chatter idly.
59 Backstage place.
16 Spanish cloak.
62 Ripening agent.
16 Raison d'—
64 Snake.
63 Ding's companion.
66 Sock chore.
67 Approaches
**DOWN**
1 Cowboy apparel.
2 Exclamation of greeting.
3 Poet Guest.
4 Representative.
5 Keep at it.
6 Japanese city.
7 Title.
8 Garland.
9 Parts of an effective law.
10 Sorroge's exclamation.
11 Exculpate.
12 Fatigue.
13 Fendal toller.
Puzzle
19 Late West Virginia Senator.
24 Overjoy.
26 Napoleonic Marshal.
28 Suffle.
30 Roman road.
31 Laire.
32 Harem rooms.
33 Long live: Span.
34 Laurel or hemlock.
35 Showed a film again.
36 Percolate through ashes.
39 Jockeys.
42 Displayed.
44 Store worker.
46 Basque court game.
48 Bogged down.
50 Essence of commerce.
51 Relative of the raccoon.
52 Complete.
53 Rips.
54 Ouaint oath.
55 Jason's ship.
57 Rhode Island rebel, 1842.
60 Unit of work.
Tokyo No.1 City in World
WASHINGTON — Tokyo is a phoenix among capitals. It has risen from the ashes of World War II fire raids to become possibly the largest and fastest-growing city in the world.
Geographers generally agree that the 500-year-old Japanese metropolis has surpassed London and New York. The estimated populations are, respectively: 8,774,000; 8,251,000; and 7,795,500.
However, varying dates of census taking, heavy movements of people, explosive birth rates, and differing concepts of metropolitan limits make it almost impossible nowadays to compare accurately the populations of the great cities, the National Geographic Society saves.
Size notwithstanding, Tokyo has the dubious honor of being the world's most congested capital. It lacks the open spaces of comparable cities; many streets are narrow and winding. The city is growing at a rate of 300,000 a year.
The National Capital Region has a radius of about 5 miles. It takes in three counties, 23 wards, and eight autonomous cities. The complex is administered by a governor and the 120-member Metropolitan Assembly.
Tokyo is bursting from its seams, spilling patternless and unchecked across the low, surrounding countryside. The huge concrete buildings and television towers planted so solidly in downtown Tokyo contrast with the disorderly march outward of suburbs. The city is largely built of wood.
I have sworn union the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man—Thomas Jefferson
Daily Hansan
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
NEWS DEPARTMENT
News Room Phone 711
Editor Janet Juncau
Associate Editor Ray Miller
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Office ... Phone 376
Business Manager ... Bill Kane
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
BLOW UP A STORM, by Garson Kanin. Random House. $3.95.
It must have been around 1940 that I read Dorothy Baker's great tale of jazz musicians. "Young Man with a Horn." Not since then have I been excited in quite the same way by a novel. "Blow Up a Storm" creates a desire to hear some good jazz, some jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, the kind, perhaps, that Red Nichols creates in a recording of "When the Saints Go Marching In," now being pushed by the disk jockeys.
Carson Kanin does blow up a storm in this brilliantly written and always absorbing novel. Kanin is the former film director who made such pictures as "Tom, Dick and Harry" and the noteworthy wartime documentary, "The True Glory." He also is the man who did that wonderful play, "Born Yesterday." In "Blow Up a Storm" he is on ground entirely different from that of the junk dealer and the mistress he wishes he hadn't had educated.
Kanin's narrator is a playwright, a former saxophone player in a jazz band of the early 1930s. While touring with his actress wife in Chicago, he receives a phone call that takes him back nostalgically to those years of the depression, to the exciting life he lived as a jazz musician in New York. And as he recalls the past he conjures up those persons who had been so integral a part of his life.
First there is Lee Woodruff, who made the phone call. Wood- ruff, the rich boy who played trumpet in those long-gone days and who seemed to have such a monumental and psychotic hatred for Negroes, even those Negroes who become associated with the little band.
There is Slug, a big Negro drummer who nervously beats out a drum tattoo, even when he is not near his drums, and who dies so mysteriously in the apartment of Woodruff after a wild nighttime dash across New York from the hospital where he has been taking a cure for drugs.
There is Edmonde, the French girl who loves jazz, who is called "Eddie" by the hero, "Madame" by Woodruff, and "Frenchlady" by Slug, who returns to Paris and reenters the lives of all the musicians when the war is over and she has been broken by the Nazi conqueror.
There is Don, the southerner with absolutely no racial prejudice, who goes from one narcotics kick to another, who is still dyeing his hair as a middle-aged musician so that he can compete with the new progressive jazz musicians of San Francisco.
There is Clara, the beautiful Negro who wanted to pass as white and who failed, whose romance with the narrator perishes in a rough street fight in Harlem, where a colored gang shows itself as intolerant of racial mixing as the white gangs uptown.
Garson Kanin, as readers of "Born Yesterday" already know, has a fine ear for the language, for vernacular touches. His jazz talk seems a bit anachronistic, but perhaps musicians have been talking that way for a quarter of a century. He also has an amazing knack of description, and in one long sequence he describes a marijuana session, in a tightly locked New York flat that oppresses first the narrator and then the reader, who almost feels himself in a state of claustrophobia.
This book, and these jazz musicians, are a valid part of our culture. Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Billie Holliday, and Kanin's Woody, Slug, Don, and Clara are memorable figures. "Giving and taking. Discovering and communicating. The blended feeling and the shared living. The good music. The Woody Woodruff Seven. I am listening to it now—here and now—and it sounds. it is, beautiful. What I call beautiful."
THE DANGEROUS AMERICAN, by A. E. Hotchner, Signet, 35 cents.
After living 31 of his 32 years in St. Louis, Johnny Cella is deported as an undesirable alien to his native Italy. This story relates his adjustment to the new life in a strange environment. Cella has the problems of being low on funds and of not speaking the language. His only contact is underworld characters who attempt to drag him into a narcotics racket. Fortunately, he gets help from two beautiful women—one a hoyden, the other a capable, virtuous wifely type. If the reader can accept the premise of a decorated veteran with a clean police record being deported on a technicality, he will find the novel intriguing and interesting. The account of life under these unusual circumstances is smoothly written, with love and suspense added for an evening of easy, enjoyable reading.
-NAP
MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, by Paddy Chayefsky. Bantam, 35 cents.
Some day a Ph.D. candidate in American literature may attempt to assess "Paddy Chayefsky and the American Vernacular." Meanwhile, Chayefsky's television and screen plays, and one play, "Middle of the Night," are worth study. It was fashionable a few years ago to praise Chayefsky (see Time, Newsweek, etc., in the "Marty" era). Now the few who follow fashions in criticism find Chayefsky very superficial, his detailed descriptions of the little people of the Bronx dull and over-realistic. "Middle of the Night" is a simple story, the Bantam publication nicely timed for release of the movie, which stars Fredric March. It's about a girl in her twenties, already a victim of one unhappy marriage, who has an affair with, and finally weds, a man in his fifties. His family fights the marriage as much as the girl's family. The story is well told and compassionate, and while it does not have a theme of enduring significance, it does have a lot to say about our marriage and engagement mores and taboos. And the language is, well, Paddy Chayefsky. —CMP