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Summer Session Kansan
Friday, July 30, 1965
So What Do I Say?
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step: only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.—Dag Hammarskjold
Well, it's that time again: time for the annual Farewell To The Campers As They Leave Beloved Mt. Oread editorial. And that is one of the most nerve-wracking topics ever to face an editorial writer. What can I say—"it's been nice having you?" And what advice can I give to 1500 high school kids—"Seek the Truth" or some similar platitude?
Tis indeed a hellish predicament, because if I sav what I mean, it's bound to be a truism:
Campers, it has been nice having you. You've made old KU a much livelier place these past six weeks! Your ingenuity and imagination have taxed both the strength and intellect of us "old-timers." Your presence has surrounded even this 19-year-old with an aura of age which has been both blessing and plague—depending upon whether it is Monday morning or TGIF-time!
IF THIS SUMMER has been only half as enriching for you as it has been for me, I know it's been a howling success. And I do hope that all well, almost all-of you come back to KU for four years.
Being a neophyte myself, I'm not too adept at dispensing the wisdom of life. But I'm an old hand at lifting the words of others who can say "it" far better than I ever could. So, in farewell, I leave your thoughts with the prologue to this editorial, and the following epitaph of George Gray from Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology":
I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me- A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth it pictures not my destination But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the
chances. Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in
And now I know that we must lift the sail And catch the winds of destiny Wherever they drive the boat.
Writing To put meaning in one's life may end in madness.
madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Jacke Thayer
Scopes Relives Famous Trial
Ed. Note: The following interview with John Scopes, 64, took place in his lakeside home on the outskirts of Shreveport, La., recently. The article, written by Kaye Northcott, editor, appeared in The Summer Texan, the University of Texas.)
Forty years ago this month, a young Kentuckian. John Thomas Scopes, was tried and found guilty of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tenn. Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, the Cross of Gold orator, represented the State of Tennessee in prosecuting the teacher for violating the Butler Law. Bryan himself had initiated this anti-evolutionary law in Tennessee and others in several states.
CLARENCE DARROW, the brilliant criminal lawyer who had successfully defended murderers Leopold and Loeb a few months before, defended Scopes in the dramatic confrontation of scientific rationality and emotional fundamentalism.
John Scopes, now 64 years old, prefers to remain in the shadows of American history. He says he would rather forget about the trial and insists that it was not of great personal significance. A retired geologist, he laughs at the idea of his being a crusader. His recollections of the trial are unromantic, matter-of-fact.
Although the name "Scopes" is familiar to any reader of American history, it brings to mind a history-making conflict, not an individual. The young teacher, who never took the witness stand, was overshadowed by the compelling personalities of Bryan and Darrow.
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Contrary to popular belief, Scopes was never a science teacher, but he "did substitute for a few days in a biology class." A University of Kentucky graduate, he was teaching math and physics to earn money for more schooling.
A FEW TOWN LIBERALS wanted to test the new Butler Law, and they asked Scopes to be their guinea pig. Scopes says he was reluctant to participate in the test, and he was not even sure that it could be proved that he had taught evolution.
(A recent New York Times article says that Scopes was not at school on April 24,1925,the day on which he reputedly taught the lesson in evolution. Scopes said he does "not remember" if he was at school on that particular day.)
Scopes described Dayton as a typical small town and its inhabitants as typically apathetic. "I don't think half the people in town had ever heard about the anti-evolution law, and furthermore, they didn't care," he said.
THE CONFRONTATION of Darrow and Bryan made the Scopes trial big news throughout the United States, and the trial became a circus. Fundamentalists flocked into town to hold endless revival meetings. One entrepreneur charged the curious visitors 10 cents apiece to look at his mangy chimpanzee, but he was outdone by a Ringling Brothers employee who brought a whole troupe of apes to the trial.
The most famous of these reporters was iconoclast H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun. He characterized the main participants this way: "Darwin is the devil, Scopes is the Harlot of Babylon, and Darrow is Beclezub in person."
A radio team from Chicago broadcasted the trial live, and more than 100 reporters molded the story into sensational copy for readers around the world.
ACCORDING TO SCOPES,
"Mencken was as much responsible for the circus as any body. He named it the Monkey Trial and then he created instances and wrote biting satire that would reach people. . . Mencken typified the type of reporter of the day. He was considered the ace."
Scopes feels that Mencken misrepresented the atmosphere of the trial. "There was a circus all right, but it was more like a real carnival than a witch burning."
And unlike Mencken, who despised Bryan, Scopes had some
sympathy for the Great Commoner who died of diabetes in Dayton only five days after the trial ended. "Bryan depended more on his emotions than he did upon his mental capacities," Scopes said. "He swayed people by playing upon their emotions, but he was basically a very honest person. I'd call him slightly on the fanatical side, but I wouldn't label him like Mencken did."
MOST TOWNSPEOPLE favored Bryan at the beginning of the trial "because he talked something like they thought." By the end of the trial, however, few still had faith in the defender of fundamentalism. With crystalline logic, Darrow exposed to ridicule Bryan's literal belief in the Bible. A broken man, Bryan was compelled to admit that the Bible could be read figuratively. Scopes had great respect for the 68-year-old Darrow, who had offered to take the case without charge because he wanted to "put Bryan in his place as a bigot."
"Darrow didn't electrify anybody. He just talked sense to them," Scopes remembered.
John Scopes left Dayton after the trial, and he has never been back. He abandoned teaching to become a geologist, but he insists that the change of occupation had nothing to do with the notoriety of being "that John Scopes." "I had only one job that I didn't get because I was John Scopes—a fellowship in one of our famous southern universities. They said I could peddle my ideas to somebody else."
THE TRIAL LASTED from July 10 through July 21. Although Scopes was found guilty, Darrow had dealt fundamentalism a sharp blow.
THE LAW PROHIBITING the teaching of evolution is still on the books in Tennessee as are similar laws in Arkansas and Mississippi. Evolution is taught in spite of the laws." They just don't call it evolution." Scopes said.
"I think if you put it to a vote in Tennessee it would be eliminated. But the public officials are afraid of losing some votes," he explained.
SPU Will Protest
Members of the KU Student Peace Union will march in protest against American policy in Viet Nam Saturday at 11 a.m. Demonstrators will march from the Military Science Building to the main Post Office, according to Tim Miller. acting SPU chairman for the summer.
Miller expects nearly 20 demonstrators to participate in the protest.
BOOK REVIEWS
AMERICAN FOLKLORE, by Richard M. Dorson (Phoenix, $1.95).
Here is a completely delightful and perceptive book, now about six years old, which takes the reader through some fascinating byways of American life. Though the old and reputable (if folklore is ever truly reputable) legends are here there are others, too.
Like, for example, those of the college student. For this, too, is folklore—"When she comes tripping by, stone lions will bark. A Revolutionary War cannon will fire out. Two facing statues will solemnly dismount from their pedestals, walk to the center of the courtyard, and clasp hands in congratulation. A series of boulders, delicately balanced atop each other by nature's art, will suddenly collapse. When she gazes their way, the Flattop Mountains will turn people with rage."
AND WHY WILL ALL these things happen? Because a virgin has passed these spots. These are among the entertaining things Richard M. Dorson tells us about the folklore of the campus—the way that papers get corrected (sometimes by the baby of the family), the star athlete and how he got through classes, the deans of women who give fascinating advice to the freshman coeds, the grisly outcome of certain fraternity initiations, the toasts and the drinking bouts and the songs, some of them that some old grads remember as being a bit too raw for print.
Dorson gives us the familiar folk heroes—Davy Crockett, the spurious Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Casey Jones, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry and Jesse James. He treats the development of folk humor on the frontier, the folklore of the Negro and the immigrant, the songs and legends of our various regions.
Dorson scoffs at the idea that folklore is dying out (and the popularity of folk singers bears him out). He can mention numerous examples, and you can find others in the daily papers, of how new stories begin and old ones get perpetuated.
AND THE WAR CAME, by Kenneth M. Stampp (Phoenix, $2.45).
Though the Civil War centennial is over, there has been and will be no abatement of interest in the war. Both scholars and readers on a more popular level continue to have available those already reputable works that deal with numerous aspects of the conflict.
One of the best is "And the War Came," which appeared some 15 years ago. Its author is A. F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California, and he has written eloquently on slavery and the reconstruction period as well as on the war itself.
Even today, 104 years after the Civil War started, one may read "And the War Came" with a sense of frustration. For it looks as though what one historian calls the blundering generation could have avoided war. Stampp considers the development of public opinion in the North prior to April 1961. And he is one of those historians who suggests that much of the blame for the war may be laid at the door of the "no compromisers."
THERE IS A CONSIDERABLE gallery of characters in this engrossing history. Here we see Lincoln, faced with the question of sending aid to the beleaguered forces at Ft. Sumter, and Maj. Robert Anderson, commander at the fort. Here is poor old Buchanan, one of our more inept presidents but one who might have gotten a better shake from history could he have been in office at a different time. Here are the radical Republicans, Sumner of Massachusetts, sour-faced Chandler of Michigan, "Bluff Ben" Wade of Ohio.
And the more moderate group, too—Charles Francis Adams, who spent the war in the British Embassy; William H. Seward, who had foreseen an "irrepressible conflict." And the abolitionists, Garrison and Phillips, who had been stirring it up for many years and were ready for war when it arrived.
This is not "southern revisionism." but Stampp does place much blame on the North for the war as well as for the attitudes that continued after the war and made reconciliation such a complex task.
THE BENCHLEY ROUNDUP, edited by Nathanial Benchley (Dell, 75 cents).
We may suppose that somewhere on this campus there are students who have never heard of Robert Benchley—a man dead now for 20 years, known maybe for some of those old movies on late television, found in certain anthologies of humor. Benchley's son has collected some of his father's finest humor in this enjoyable volume.
These are all short sketches, and there are a good many of them in this book. Once again we have the fun of reading about "Uncle Edith," one of Benchley's memorable creations, of seeing the old master wreck Shakespeare and dissect Mozart and make fun of our legal system and our incompetent husbands and life among the newts and what it's like in our business offices and what's happening in crime prevention (he is concerned with the matter of determining who is criminal and who isn't).
Will this book hold up for the new generation of Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory? We hope so. Benchley was a gentle man, and maybe it's just as well that he died about the time World War II was dying and didn't have to face up to the "new humor."
PA
THE STORY TELLING STONE: MYTHS AND TALES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS, edited by Susan Feldmann (Dell Laurel, 60 cents).
This is an original, and it's an exciting kind of book to dig into, especially for any of us who find American culture as interesting as that of some of Margaret Mead's people of the South Seas. What the editor has done is to collect stories from the Indians about men and animals and gods and the supernatural and love, hate, jealousy and magic and such matters that absorb the sophisticated white as well as the more primitive red man of earlier days.
The author, an anthropologist, has grouped the stories under general classifications. First are stories of the days of creation, legends from many tribes. Eskimos on down south. Then there are those she calls "The Trickster." The largest category is stories of heroes, the supernatural and related folk tales.
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