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University Daily Kansan Monday, Feb. 6, 1961
Not Divided-Disunited
It was difficult not to get excited about politics during the past election year. First the primaries, then the summer conventions, then the stumping, speeches, charges and counter-charges, and finally the election.
The political activities engendered hard feelings and suspicion among the best of friends. The lines were drawn early in the campaign. The confident ones stepped to their sides; the more deliberate teetered on the line until election day. When it was all over, the alienated parties embraced and vowed that the future would be marked by harmony.
What a sham! What a farce! What gross errors were made by the candidates and their followers in trying to maintain the schism that once separated the two parties. What two parties? The Democratic platform was overexaggerated in its liberal tone but certainly stood on the left. The Republicans, pointing in derision at the extravagant and "Socialistic" foundation of the opposition party, pushed their platform on the same rails while attention was drawn to the enemy.
THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE WAS held suspect for his sometime conservative utterances. The Republican candidate was denounced as a traitor to the traditional precepts of the party by the Old Guard. Through all this, it became more difficult for those interested in doing so to discern exactly what the party differences were.
It is paradoxical, but not without reason, that two parties that began with such widely divergent philosophies, ideals and membership should evolve into the present amorphous organizations of today.
To trace the familial trees of the parties would be to encounter radical changes and near-reversals in ancestral strains of both. To start at the beginning of the two parties one finds a distinction that is clearly outlined and completely different from today. But even as short a period as 50 years ago the two parties would little resemble their present makeup. This evolution is no more striking than the changes in the nation's culture and society. The country's basic document, the Constitution, has been amended 22 times to meet the public's changing demands.
In the nation's youth, two parties or schools of thought were the natural outgrowth of the heterogeneous composition of the sections of the country. Basically, they were the agrarian class—the common man who toiled in debt as well as in the soil, and the merchant or urban class—the aristocrats and industrial workers whose ideological and economical structure was the exact opposite of the agrarian.
Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans was the original party for service to the common man. Alexander Hamilton's Federalist was the party that stood for the rights of commerce. Since the founding, these two elements have been
at odds and their struggle can be considered the cause of the nation's progress and growth as well as its periods of strife.
Again a paradox: Jefferson the aristocrat and architect of the government representing the common man and advocate of state's sovereignty; and Alexander Hamilton, who rose from poverty to represent the class of wealth and business, and advocate of a strong federal government. Even at that time, however, the two parties partly resembled their heirs.
JEFFERSON'S PARTY, WHICH LATER became the Democratic party, stood for strong international ties, collective security and separation of the government from the affairs of the states. Hamilton's party, the Federalists, died shortly, was revived by the Whigs and emerged as the Republican party in 1854. It stood for nationalism, a central control over the states, and the dependence upon business for the welfare of the country.
When one speaks of party differences, the war between the North and South stands as the manifestation of the ideologies in conflict. The Republican North headed the country for an industrial society; the Democratic South demanded an agrarian economy and society.
The South and the Democrats lost.
From that time, the Republicans have been equated with a high tariff, big business, laissezfaire economy, a functionary presidency, isolationism the importance of the individual, and reaction.
The Democrats have been categorically equated with the obverse of these positions.
But today, there is a difference in ideologies but it is not as distinctly labeled by party names as in the past. Now all are basically in accord on the role of the government and the presidency, but it is now a difference of degree, not party. For the Democrats have a conservative wing that would be in agreement with Republican principles more often than with their own. And the Republican liberals stand firmly on the Democratic tenets. For instance, Sen. Harry Byrd (D-Va) and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York would be hard to label. And the recent fight in Congress over the House Rules Committee was over this very point.
AND WE NOW FIND OURSELVES BACK to the two presidential candidates of the past campaign. Both offered the same solutions to the current problems, only a semantical difference occurred. And now we see the president having selected his administrative officers, not on the basis of party loyalty or allegiance, but by personal capability.
The day of one party politics may soon come. At least a realignment or rebirth of party principles is called for if we are to have the two party system continue.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Frank Morgan
HOW DID THE FACULTY MEETING GO. DEAR?/'
Dailu Hansan UNIT PRIETT
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became bweekly 1904,
trieweekly 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 Network. 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. Hosts hoys and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
John Peterson Managing Editor
Bill Blundell, Carrie Edwards, Lynn
Cheatum and Ralph Wilson, Assistant
Managing Editors; Tom Turner, City
Editor; Bill Shelton, Sports Editor;
Sue Thiem, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and
Dan Felger ___ Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
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Tom L. Brown, Circulation Manager;
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National Advertising Manager.
International Jayhawker
By Augustine G. Kyci Ghana senior
Searching through the ragbag of my memory, I have stumbled upon something. It is the packet of surprises the USA unfolds to foreigners during their sojourn here in this country. In their version of "bull sessions" the foreigners term "general assembly," experiences like the following can whiz over your tympanum:
A little girl would not believe I am from Africa. "If he is from Africa," she said, "why is his friend not with him." "What friend," I asked. "The monkey," she said.
• • •
There was the case of a Pakistani student who mistook a cake frosting for gravy. He drained a heavy dose of it over his potatoes, but later discovered that he had concocted some kind of dessert. His was a perfect frosting for any potato-cake condiment.
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In Ames, Iowa, last summer, a friend from Iraq commented one evening on seeing the center page of the "Playboy" magazine; "That was my first experience," he said. "I could not sleep well last night. I was all shook up."
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My friend from Ethiopia somehow became so confused the first few days after his arrival that, in addressing the envelope to his fiance in Ethiopia, first he put down her name, then the street number, etc., but wound up with the city of Lawrence whence he wrote. He posted that letter by jet airmail and it came back the next morning with the utmost alacrity. Wrong address!
. . .
A student from India once said that he was always a-no-match in speed to his American friends when it came to eating the rubber-like lunch meat and hotdogs.
I spelt and pronounced my name to an American friend. With a quizzical face, he said: "It sure doesn't sound right. Who named you anyhow? Whoever did it sure turned the alphabets upside down."
Hodding Carter
(The following is excerpted from the autobiographical book by Mr. Hodding Carter, the distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning editor and publisher of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat Times.
While ordinarily the last task I would ever undertake is a defense of Southern politicians — who are indefensible as often as not as is the case with politicians everywhere . . . I could not help summoning the Penobscots as allies.
The book, "Where Main Street Meets the River," was published in 1952. The excerpt is from the chapter headed, "Northern Persians and Southern Polites," which satirically answers a Northerner's charge that the South had "the mistreated Negro too much on its mind, and why couldn't Southerners be helped by hypothetically paralleling the plight of the Penobscot Indians of Maine with the Negro of the South.)
I had no statistics available, but I surmised that had the Negro in the South been as systematically exterminated or herded voteless and voiceless into reservations as Indians have been for three hundred years, permitted by the white father whose wards they were to go hungry and naked and to be robbed, there would be no Negro problem for Southern and Northern politicians to batten upon, for the very simple reason that there would be not enough Negroes to matter, just as there are not enough Indians to matter, either in terms of conscience or politics. .
Southern Exposure
IN A PERORATION WORTHY,
I hope, of the late John C. Calhoun, I said, assume now that one hundred years ago the economy of Massachusetts and Maine and all of the Eastern states had rested upon the reluctant backs of those Penobscot and assorted Indians, and that instead of just killing those who wouldn't knuckle under, you had paid your good money with a bad conscience for them; assume too that the South's economy at that time had been in no wise dependent upon the field labor of the Penobscots, and that the South's political objective was to maintain a strong central government, dedicated to the expansion of Southern industry, the maintenance of the South a, the nation's financial center, and the perpetuation of Southern political mastery by westward expansion, which didn't allow any enslaved Penobscots around, only some free Sioux survivors.
ASSUME that an itchy-fingered
Mississippian who liked Penobscot Indians had galloped north at the head of a posse or mob, recruiting a few red warriors on the way, and had holed up in the Springfield armory until the Green Mountain Light Infantry had dislodged and hanged them.
ASSUME that along about this time, William Faulkner's great-grandmother, who wasn't named Harriet Beecher Faulkner, had written a book about how the New Englanders had killed and pillaged and polluted the Penobscots, so feelingly and so truthfully that all the South was ready to come to the aid of the Indians.
ASSUME that New England didn't like this bellicose attitude and had signified its renewed intention to resign as it had once offered to do back in 1812.
ASSUME that because of a legally untested belief that the states were indissolubly united rather than federated, the South had dispatched the First Virginia Cavaliers to Boston Harbor and that a loyal Home Guard on shore had decided to try out a new breech-loading Indian killer on the haughty Virginians.
ASSUME that during the war which followed, the president of the Southern nation had decreed that all Penobscots and other Indians in the territory not even conquered by the victorious Dixiecrats were hereinafter free and entitled to the land taken from them for the past three hundred years, including all real estate in Boston, most of New York state and whatever they wanted in New Jersey, if any, with interest compounded at eight per cent; and, following the glorious Southern victory and the occupation of all principal cities and county seats, assume that the president had enfranchised the Penobscots, disenfranchised the New Englanders, enrolled the naturally grudge-bearing braves in the occupation army, and invited his compatriots to come up North and help themselves to the loot.
Assuming all this, I asked . . .
would you be surprised if for the next two generations following this hypothetical war for Indian freedom, a lot of New England politicians would know just what side their platform was buttered on?
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