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University Daily Kansan Monday. April 17, 1961
Today-100 Years Ago
The federal arsenal at Ft. Sumter, S. C., has been in the hands of Gen. D. T. Beauregard and his Confederate brigade for five days.
Abraham Lincoln has been president of the United States for one and one-half months.
Kansas has been the 34th state for two and one-half months.
Day before yesterday, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to join the Union forces for three months and appealed to "all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our national Union and the perpetuity of popular government..."
Today, the governor of Missouri replied to Lincoln's call that "not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade."
Later today, Capt. Sam Walker, of Lawrence, delivered 100 men to Governor Robinson of Kansas to form a military company to join the Union forces.
★★
THESE WERE THE EVENTS that drew the attention of Kansans 100 years ago today, April 17. Those that were here, the ones who had resisted drought, the diseases, the pestilence, the forays of the pro-slavers, and the hardships of breaking the earth to eke out subsistence,
were then faced with war on the very soil they had fought with nature to gain.
And today, 100 years later, that state which was born of strife and hardship looks back at those pioneers in tribute. If only they could see their infant today—the one nursed on blood and sweat, broiled under the summer sun, whipped by the prairie winds, and choked on the sea of dust—they would know the struggle was not in vain.
That valiant beginning has not been diminished in the growth of the state. The grassy plains have become cornucopias of golden grain that feed, not only America, but also the hungry of the world. The resources have been utilized to contribute to civilization's progress. The towns and communities have changed from the centers of defense and supply to centers of commerce, culture and learning. And the descendants of those first settlers still retain the spirit of the pioneers who met and conquered this western wilderness.
So, as the University of Kansas begins its week of Centennial celebration, thoughts will inevitably turn back the calendar to the beginning and to this day, 100 years ago. The future they faced must have seemed as perilous as the one ahead of us. We hope that those here on this day, 100 years from now, will be as proud of the achievements of the coming century as we are of the last one.
Frank Morgan
Fight For Freedom
Editor:
Who really are these people? Why are they anxious? Why do they only listen and watch? Are they really not involved in the
Mr. Blundell's editorial "The Third Camp" describes a group of people who "are not directly or personally involved in (the) moral issues of the Eichmann trial, but who retain an intense interest in the case because it involves such an enormous question of Right and Wrong in human relationships." They are described as being a group of "anxious watchers and listeners."
moral issues of the Eichmann trial? Do not the deeds of this man affect them in any but a passive and detached manner? If a crime of such magnitude does not involve their own morality, what does?
We are a Democracy. We are a nation dedicated to freedom and opposed to totalitarianism. We are a people whose forefathers founded this country as a result of religious and political persecution. Democracy is the living realization of this heritage. Can it be that Democracy is nothing but an abstraction to these people, unrelated to their own lives and beliefs?
We cannot remain aloof to such
moral issues because they do not directly or personally pertain to us. We must affirm our beliefs regardless of to whom, or where, such abuses occur. Let us stop watching and listening. Let us move beyond inaction. Let us reaffirm Freedom and Democracy. Let us be sure that Freedom is worth fighting for. In the last analysis, this is what the "third camp" is anxious about. This is the pathos of the anxious watcher and listener. He just isn't sure.
Stephen S. Baratz
WHAT DO MOST OF US remember about the past 15 years? Harry Truman, George Marshall, Henry Wallace, mink coats and vicuna rugs, deep freezers, Dixon and Yates, steel strikes, Nuremberg, Dean Acheson, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Costello, Charles Van Doren—these are some of the names and episodes in this volume.
The ever-oppressing theme is that of a confused nation and confused world, recognizing that there was little alternative to Korea but hating the "police action" nevertheless. Up to 1955 Goldman does an excellent job of summing up America; the last section has been done too soon. It lacks the perceptions and the force of the earlier pages. It is too obviously a tacked-on segment.
Chairman,
Civil Rights Council
Bronx, N. Y., graduate student
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AND AFTER, by Eric F. Goldman. Vintage, $1.45.
Historical assessments are difficult to make when the event is still fresh in the memory and consciousness. But occasionally a historian—a social historian, it would seem—is able to pull off the trick. Frederick Lewis Allen did it with "Only Yesterday" (but failed with "Since Yesterday"). Eric F. Goldman did it with "The Crucial Decade."
Goldman's "crucial decade" is 1945-1955. As close as the decade is to us, it contains much that we have forgotten, and much, perhaps, that we will not admit. We see here a nation swept up in McCarthyism and MacArthurism, setting forth a theory of conspiracy (Roosevelt and Hiss and the Communists caused World War II). We see a nation that went from idol to idol, that in its frenzy to pick MacArthur or Eisenhower to solve its problems seemed unaware that it might solve some itself.
THIS VOLUME, FIRST PUBLISHED five years ago, now is out in paperback form. The new edition is not the original. Goldman has felt called upon to bring the story up to date, so he takes it through most of 1960. Most of it, I repeat—the name of John F. Kennedy does not appear even in the index.
Short Ones
In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.— Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
There is no substitute for hard work.—Thomas Alva Edison
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All our words from loose using have lost their edge. —Ernest Hemingway
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.—Karl Marx
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1839, 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 Corp. New York N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturday and Sunday. End of examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
John Peterson ... Managing Editor
Bill Blundell, Carrie Edwards, Lynn
Cheatum and Ralph Wilson, Assistant
Managing Editors; Tom Turner, City
Editor; Bill Sieldon, Sports Editor;
Sue Tileman, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and
Co-Editorial Edito
Dan Felger ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
John H. Harris, Advertising Manager;
F. Mike Harris, Advertising Manager;
Tom L. Brown, Circulation Manager;
Richard Horn, Classified Advertising Manager;
Promotion Manager; Martin Zimmerman,
National Advertising Manager.
HEY COACH, WHAT'S THIS I HEAR ABOUT A 'WINNING PROSPECT' YOU FOUND FOR US THIS SEASON?''
From the Magazine Rack
Chicago, Chicago
"Chicago is an illusory city. To drive into it by car through the great complex of eight-lane freeways that swing airily across cloverleaf junctions and coiling flyovers, and then down on to the surpassingly beautiful Lake Shore Drive, is to infer that little can ail a metropolis of such radiant magnificence. For mile upon mile the rainbow cars ooze with their big-engine casualness along those lake-front tree-arcaded boulevards, on one side the white sails of that now obligatory household accessory, the small boat, flecking Michigan's blue waters, on the other the glinting, scaring sierras of sky-scraper apartment-houses and office buildings, a lovely and splendid cliff-range of towering white stone, glass, and metal. They made me think of white teeth that shine in a skull. At almost any point in those resplendent frontage miles you have to divert only a few blocks to be in the city's squallid interior, a complex of interminable, ugly, shabby streets which for long sections slide into some of the worst festering slums to be found anywhere, including Glasgow and the Middle East.
"A TRUE SENSE of what you are entering is gained if you reach Chicago by train, as on this occasion I did from New York. As you approach the industrial fringes the rails fray out wider and wider into a vast skein, the convergence of 19 trunk lines, a 1,750-square-mile sorting centre for 221,000 miles of national rail arteries that end and start here, and where 45,000 goods cars are loaded and unloaded every day. Presumably you already know that you are 1,745 miles from the West Coast and 713 miles from the East Coast, but what suddenly drives home that this is the very belly of the Middle West, the central transit point of this enormous land, and so the arrival point for job-seekers from everywhere, is the sight of the banked processions of freight trucks that pass you and which are passed. For me, the insignia on their sides were a distillation of all the romance and wonder of American history, the symbols of distance and lunging frontiers and restless adventurousness. Chesapeake & Ohio, Pennsylvania, B & O, Sante Fe, Overland Route Mid America, Rock Island, The Chief, Florida East Coast, Armour Stock Express, Southern Pacific, Mobile and Ohio, The Route Of The Hiawatha, Texas and Pacific, Wabash, Louisville and Nashville, Everywhere West—Burlington Route . . . the rumbling litany gave me a private satisfaction, for it seemed to ring with the authentic clangour of folk-history, to the essential stuff of that aspect of the American legend that is made up of such ingredients as Big Bill Haywood's itinerant union organisers—the 'Wobblies' of the I.W.W.—New Deal construction camps, the big exoduses of 'The Grapes of Wrath' period, the bums produced by the big strikes and lock-outs of the 1890s and the Depression hoboes riding the rods and the boxcars across the continent, the mythological John Henry, Casey Jones, and Paul Bunyan, the 'fast Western' piano style of the Carolina turpentine camps, blues-minstrels like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly, the break-out of jazz from the Mississippi Valley in the twenties, radical guitarists like Woody Guthrie, the period of the Dust Bowl and the migratory harvest workers and loggers . . . all the movement and mixture under economic pressures, all the fluid patterns which are only just beginning to congeal into a recognisable American image."
(Excerpted from "Black, White, and the Blues" by Kenneth Allsop in the April 1960 Encounter.)