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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 27, 1965
The Last Word - I Hope!
For the benefit of "our five readers" I will explain that the following treatise is an attempt by this fiery, reformist student editor to get in "the last word" with her disillusioned, liberal news adviser:
I STILL APPLY the word "disillusioned" to you in a negative sense. Abandon the delusions, yes, but never the illusions. For ideals, hopes, dreams "and even expectations" are all illusions. And no one can fight effectively for the former without having the latter.
To represent your generation well, you are going to have to stop playing hide-and-go-seek with semantics and logic.
We have no delusions of simplicity about racial policy problems. We do have illusions and are trying to jolt you "oldsters" and your elders out of a lethargic muddle so solutions can be found.
Obviously, we can't carry the ball alone. And it irks us that we're getting no help from a generation preoccupied with deciding if it's really young or not. Assuming the pearly eminence of an old age complex to tell us how young you are is a shabby defense for inaction, but it does keep your hands from getting dirty.
TRUE, HOISTING placards bearing four-letter words—when considered out of context—may not be crucial to the nation's future. But Michelangelo did not sculpt the Pietà by concerning himself only with major policy decisions; its beauty came through careful attention to detail.
You (old age complex and all) have a responsibility to work for the "illusions" of my generation, if only because you begat us into this mess. So let's cut the senior citizen jazz and get to work!
IT WOULD BE GOOD for both our five readers and for us to reflect upon the words of Dag Hammarskjold in "Markings":
Our "illusions" are not so different, my dear Dr. Pickett—only our approaches. Whitley Austin once said that the hardest lesson for a newspaperman to learn is to accept fools gladly. Both being newspapermen, fledgling and "aged," let us bury the hatchet and accept each other's failings. And, for God's sake, let us consider apathy as anathema.
"The man who is unwilling to accept the axiom that he who chooses one path is denied the others must try to persuade himself, I suppose, that the logical thing to do is to remain at the crossroads.
"But do not blame the man who does take a path—nor commend him, either."
Jacke Thayer
Uncle Robert's Bedtime Story
Today Uncle Robert will tell you about the great WUDS controversy. A controversy of such bitterness and importance is usually relegated to such luminaries as a Lippmann or Reston for comment, but by the nature of the beast(s), somehow the Uncle Robert Treatment seems in order.
It all started when the seagulls down at the dump found themselves without a home. A very sad situation. Of course some of the birds had already been moving out into the "District" in anticipation of the coming catastrophe, but most of them were caught with their pin feathers down, as it were.
Soon, all over the University District, displaced seagulls were walking in the gutters, pecking at whatever might come along. Often there were long periods between garbage cans and the situation became serious.
The controversy developed when a group of the older residents, called WUDS (White University District Seagull) formed their Jim Seagull Must Go Movement and made, through their local Gutter Estate Dealer, an alliance with the Seattle street cleaners. The Dump birds were to be washed out of the gutters and into the streets!
"Why, my dear," said one prominent WUDS, "they do terrible things to the value of your gutter and I'm sure they all want to lay eggs with our daughters!
Summer Session
Kansan
111-112 Flint Hall
University of Kansas Student
Telephone UN 4-3198, business
UN 4-3646, newsroom
Jacke Thayer ... Managing Editor
Tom Magur ... Business Manager
University Daily Kansan (regular session) founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member of Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50th St, New York 22, 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 Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Published Tuesdays and Fridays during Summer Session. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas. Accommodations, goods, services, and employment advertised in the University Daily Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or national origin.
Why just the other day at our Daughters of the American Seagull meeting, we were talking about how they were all card carrying members of the Herring Gull Party!"
"Them Dumpies sure can dance and sing though," commented her friend.
Soon the controversy broke out into the streets and seagulls were seen everywhere carrying picket signs and "sitting in" at "WUDSonly" garbage cans. The fact came out that a number of the demonstrators were northern birds that had come down from the Bellingham area.
When asked to comment on the situation, local Seagull-Patrol member Clark Bird said: "Them damn Dumpies been tearing around and talkin' about votin' and eatin' in WUDS garbage cans and stuff like that. Man, that's against the law! Any of them kind gets beaky with me I'm gonna clip their wings!"
Meanwhile back in Washington the other Washington), S.B.I. Director J. Edgar Vacuumbird commented on reports of Herring Gull infiltration into the Civil Bird Movement: "There are no less than one hundred card carrying members of the Herring Gull Party taking part in the recent disturbances in Seattle. Half of them, of course, are members of the S.B.I."
Seagull University President Charles Odorib remarked that he was disturbed over the fact that certain members of the student body had been seen flying in formation with Dumpie demonstrators, but felt that there was no basis for charges of Herring Gull activity "on HIS campus by God!"
How is this mess going to end? No one can be sure, but the comment of Mario Seagull, leader of the student faction of the demonstrations, seems appropriate: "___!" Comments by other principals in the dispute, notably Gov. Seagull Wallace, are much greater in length, but tend to boil down to essentially Mario's statement.
Uncle Robert will keep you informed of the goings on in this area and will comment later in length on the new student F.S.M. (Free Seagull Movement). Remember, however, the next time you get decorated by a passing seagul, it was probably less a call of nature than a political comment.
Univ. of Washington Daily
—"Uncle Robert's Dregs"
"Thanks—Thanks A Lot—Thanks Again— Can I Lean Back Now?"
BOOK REVIEWS
FREEDOM'S FERMENT, by Alice Felt Tyler (Harper Torchbooks, $2.75).
One of the grand historians of America is Alice Felt Tyler, of the University of Minnesota. In "Freedom's Ferment" she brought to vivid life the story of reform in the 19th century. The book is as solid and as absorbing today as it was when it appeared in 1944, and this paperback edition is a worthy purchase.
the practical realist may scoff at some of the visionaries who inhabit these pages, but these are the people who laid the foundation for present-day institutions (though some of them—the utopians and the millennialists and the spiritualists—have survived only in history). These were people looking for a better life in a time of history when children labored at the looms and black men were in bondage.
THE HISTORY ACTUALLY begins in the colonial era, for the author chooses to treat the optimism of the Enlightenment and its meaning in America, and to consider the Constitution, the role of Jefferson, the influence of the frontier. She also writes in detail of religion, of Jonathan Edwards and missionary societies, of the revivalists of the frontier, of the place of religion in our early-day colleges.
Then there are what she calls "cults and utopias." There are portraits of Emerson and Margaret Fuller and the other transcendentalists, of the Millerites and the Fox sisters with their spiritualism, of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, of the various communistic cults that thrived in churches, of the Shakers, and the Oneida community, and the dreamers of Brook Farm and Hopedale, of the followers of Owen and Fourier.
Most important is her treatment of the humanitarian crusades of the day. No one can scoff at the persons who fought for better education, the common school, the high school, training for women. Few can scorn those who looked at our prisons and the treatment of our debtors and found the systems evil. Admiration must go to those who worked for the poor, the deaf-mutes and the blind, and the insane.
And especially there were the abolitionists—Phillips. Lovejoy, Garrison and the many minor figures. The author brings her excellent history down to the Civil War, and one finds himself wishing that she would continue with the postwar period, when temperance and woman's rights, in particular, came upon even more interesting days.
FOR SOME, THE TEMPERANCE reformers were a different matter. This is a story that will amuse and annoy as it educates. And there were the nativistic movements and the various kinds of bigotry that marked the 19th century as they mark the 20th. There were peace crusaders, and there were those tough women who labored for woman's rights.
It is good that such a book has been written, but even better that it is out in an inexpensive form for the young scholar in the university.
Coke was attorney general, speaker of the House of Commons, and chief justice of England. In 1628 he was author of the Petition of Right, so significant in both British and American tradition. He was also a husband, and Mrs. Bowen gives a vivid description of his manifold battles with the beautiful Lady Hatton whom he married.
Popularized history and biography have always been the strong suit of Catherine Drinker Bowen, whose most memorable books have been about John Adams and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. This well received book came out in early 1957, and its canvas and setting are quite different—England in 1552-1634. For her hero is Sir Edward Coke, the "oracle of the law" in the days of Elizabeth and James I.
Sir Edward Coke was both a great lawyer and a popular man at court. This was the time of England's great flowering, and there are portraits of the monarchs as well as of the adventurers, the Raleighs and the Essexes, and Bacon, with whom Coke had a celebrated rivaly.
Generally speaking the book is a reputable and exciting exercise in both biography and the law. It is long and detailed, and Mrs. Bowen recognizes the need to make her complex subject matter understandable. Sometimes, as in her earlier books, she does a bit of fictionalizing, but we may forgive her those minor transgressions.
THE LION AND THE THRONE, by Catherine Drinker Bowen (Little, Brown, $6; also available in paperback edition).
WINDOW ON THE SQUARE, by Phyllis A. Whitney (Crest, 60 cents); THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (Dell 50 cents); OPERATION CROSSBOW, by Richard Wormser (Dell, 50 cents); BACKGROUND TO DANGER, by Eric Ambler (Dell, 60 cents).
(Den, 60 cents).
Four for those times when "Herzog" or "Ship of Fools" is just too much to handle. The basic theme is excitement and danger; otherwise the four have little in common.
"Window on the Square" is about a damsel in distress, a girl who fears that a man is a killer. It's an exciting whodunit. "The Case of Jennie Brice" is a Rinehart mystery classic that goes back to 1913—a beautiful actress and the circumstances around her disappearance. "Operation Crossbow" is one of those new literary novelties—a book based on a movie. This one is a spy drama of World War II. And "Background to Danger" is a peerless spy thriller, done by Eric Ambler in the days before the war—earmarked for spooky types like Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Zachary Scott.
THE AGE OF AUTOMATION, by Sir Leon Bagrit (Mentor, 60 cents)—A British industrialist shows how automation only recently has come into its own as an industrial tool but how it has launched a revolution that already is transforming society. The book is an adaptation of the author's Reith lectures given over BBC in 1965.