Page 2
University Daily Kansan Monday, May 4, 1950
May Day Joke Hurts KU
Campus pranksters were on the prowl Thursday night preparing for the celebration of May Day. They weren't delivering May baskets filled with flowers and candy. They were playing Communist. The Chi Omega fountain was dyed red, Russian flags were found flying from the Strong Hall flag pole and in Jimmy Green's hand, and handbills were distributed by the organization called "The First University Congress of the Young Bolsheviks."
Most of us had a big laugh over the antics of these pranksters, but the nature of their joke
could have serious repercussions.
Many people fear the ideology of Communism so much that they never hesitate to label anyone who disagrees with them a Communist. If word of the May Day celebration at the University were spread around the result could be very harmful to the reputation of KU.
The line between the funny and the serious in pranks is very thin. No person or thing was actually harmed in the May Day joke, unless it was the honor of the University in the eyes of outsiders looking in. —Pat Swanson
Why Not a Catholic President?
The General Assembly of the American Council of Christian Churches last week stated it would oppose a Roman Catholic nominee for the presidency on grounds it would precipitate a major religious conflict.
The organization represents 15 constituent and two affiliated fundamental Protestant denominations with 1,500,000 male members across the nation.
A 150-member assembly unanimously adopted the resolution saying the action was aimed specifically at the possibility that Sen. John Kennedy (D-Mass) might be nominated for the presidency.
"...such conflict would seriously divide the United States in an hour when the unity and welfare of the nation is of paramount importance in our cold war struggle with Communism," the resolution said.
The improbability of "a religious conflict of major proportions" can be seen by a look at the Catholics in various public offices today.
The first amendment to the Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of a religion," thereby assuring a division of church and state. Kennedy has been quoted in "Look" magazine as saying: "I believe ... that the separation of church and state is fundamental to our American concept and heritage and should remain so."
ge and should remain there. There has been little opposition to allowing
Catholics in any high governmental office, except for the presidency.
The Republican party has never nominated a Catholic for the number one executive job. The Democrats tried Al Smith. Whether Smith lost the election because he was a Catholic is debatable, but out of the 1928 election came the rule that Catholicism and the presidency do not mix.
There are eight Catholic governors, and twelve Catholics hold Senate seats.
Eugene J. McCarthy was the Democratic senatorial nominee in the last election in Minnesota, a state with a heavy Lutheran population. There is also a strong Scandinavian-Protestant political tradition in both major parties. But McCarthy defeated his opposition, a Lutheran, by a wide margin.
Sen. Frank J. Lausche already has proved that religion means nothing in Ohio. He has won five times as governor and once as Senator although he is a Catholic who married a Protestant, a combination that was supposed to alienate both Protestants and Catholics.
There was no rioting in the streets in Minnesota and Ohio.
Kennedy's religion will be discussed until the 1960 nominations. It will probably cost him some votes. But to say Kennedy's election would plunge the United States into a major religious conflict is going overboard. Doug Yocom
Editor:
Mr. Harald Meyer's letter to the Wednesday's Daily Kansas, while not a resplendent example of precise English prose, does seem to resemble the odor of bathtub gin. Mr. Meyer apparently believes, if I read his letter correctly, that closing hours for women's dormitories
have something to do with virginity. He is, I take it, against the latter, although his pronouncement couched as it is in a sentence with two negatives, might be construed otherwise.
The exact relationship of closing hours to virginity is not clarified by use of the term, "medieval
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS BY BIBLER
moralis." Mr. Meyer apparently accepts the rather vulgar bourgeois conception that large, complicated questions of moral and ethical behavior may be reduced to sexual terms alone. If we must accept Mr. Meyer's quaint conception, we may I suppose, assume that goliardic poetry is not studied in the Western Civilization program.
"I take it you've never had fencing lessons."
By referring to virginity as "sentimental," Mr. Meyer is apparently confusing virginity with chastity. Virginity is a physiological condition. How can it be sentimental any more than retention of one's wisdom teeth is sentimental?
Chastity, on the other hand, exists in the mind and is, therefore, not a physiological condition. I must confess that I do not consider chastity sentimental any more than I consider the lack of it enlightenment. I might suggest to Mr. Meyer that he consult Spenser's "Faerie Queue." Spenser does not confuse chastity with virginity.
Mr. Meyer's letter would not seem so remarkable had it been written in the 1920's when, we are told, it was fashionable to cry out for freedom from society's restraint (freedom, one might ask, to do what). But today, he is merely whipping a dead, and quite desiccated, horse.
All this aside, the issue of chastity or, as Mr. Meyer would have it, virginity, has precious little to do with closing hours.
John S. Lewis
Assistant Instructor of English
John S. Lewis
Editorial Policy
Letters to the Editor should be limited to 300 words and be typed double space. The writer should type and sign his name. No unsigned letters will be run. However, names may be withheld on request.
By Calder M. Pickett
Assistant Professor of Journalism
GREAT TRAIN ROBBERIES OF THE WEST, by Eugene B. Block. Coward-McCann, $5.
This is pure "Americana." There is little in "Great Train Robberies of the West" of historical significance, but much of it compares favorably with the kind of article occasionally being published in American Heritage.
Eugene B. Block is an ex-newspaperman and a member of the San Francisco Board of Parole Commissioners. He also is a capable writer who obviously is enthralled with the subject of crime in the Old West. Some of his work is purple prose; most of it is straight and factual and informed.
The purple prose is like his beginning:
"Life was cheap and often brief in western frontier days and the .45 Colt, since known as 'the gun that won the West,' ruled supreme. The hardships and trials of pioneering years had fashioned a code that respected bullets rather than law; might was master over right."
The factual material is almost everything else. His approach is chronological, the first of his stories being that of John T. Chapman, a Sunday school superintendent in Reno, who made off with gold and silver from the Comstock Lode in 1870. The last is the holdup of the Sunset Limited of the Southern Pacific Feb. 15, 1933.
The Southern Pacific was hit by robbers 59 times over that span of years. It is the S.P., in fact, that Block writes about most. But each episode is worth reading, and some of the episodes are full of the fascination of the desert, old-fashioned mail cars, and swiftly riding desperadoes.
Among the episodes:
The Dalton gang, born and raised in Missouri, under the eye of a mother who was afraid that her sons bore the taint of their relatives, the Younger brothers and the James boys. The Daltons became deputy marshals, then went bad, began to rob both trains and banks, and on Oct. 5, 1892, ended their careers when their calculations went awry in Coffeyville, Kan. Eight men—including four local businessmen—lay dead on Coffeyville streets that day.
Carl the Tramp, an amiable hobo who in 1894 found a sackful of gold coins along the banks of the Sacramento River. Carl went to San Francisco, and lived like a prince, until he was caught. "The only thing I regret," he told the court, "is that they didn't leave me alone long enough to spend it all."
he alone long enough to spend a day.
Al Jennings of Oklahoma, a son of the Old South, who turned train robber after two of his brothers were shot in a dispute with a prosecutor and a sheriff. He became one of the most famous bandits of the West, and a close friend of a prison-mate, the writer O. Henry. Jennings now lives peacefully in southern California, where he preaches against leading a life of crime.
Arthur M. Colen's photographic memory helped to bring about the capture of a bandit who had killed a traveling passenger agent for the Southern Pacific. Because of his memory, the robber, Ralph Farriss, went to the gallows Jan. 15, 1915.
Roy Gardner is known as the king of escape artists. After committing only one crime, Gardner tricked two marshals who were taking him to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington state and made a getaway. He became a train robber, and continued to make incredible escapes. He took his own life, using cyanide pellets, in early 1950.
All are good stories, and Block sums them up with a quotation from Emmett Dalton, last of the famous gang. "The biggest fool on earth," said Dalton, "is the one who thinks he can beat the law, that crime can be made to pay."
Worth Repeating
Atheism in the modern artist represents a kind of purification . . . from secondhand and obsolete religious habits, a purging of inferior consolations, hopes, and sentiments.Amos N. Wilder
***
I wish some of the ardent advisers of the human race would read a certain passage in Thomas a Kempis:
"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." David Grayson in "The Countryman's Year," quoted in the Reader's Digest
* *
"The Christian ideal," it is said, "has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
—Harold Begbie in the "Life of William Booth"
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
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 $4.50 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 ... Douglas Parker, Managing Editor
Business Department ... Bill Feitz, Business Manager
Editorial Department ... Pat Swanson and Martha Crosier,
                    Co-Editorial Editors