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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 13, 1965
Fiery Youth, Hot Summers
Summer, one of our youthful journalistic opinion-makers the other day, is apparently the time for placid editors. There may be things to grumble about, but not in the Summer Session Kansan, please. No civil rights demonstrations on the second floor of Strong. Fraser's walls are going to come tumbling down and there's no point in fighting it. And it gets too hot in Kansas to get excited about issues.
Student editorials, apparently,cannot be bland. Hell has got to be raised.
For almost a year this writer has been dragging himself through the files of Ed Howe's famous Atchison Globe and later publication called E. W. Howe's Monthly, and the notes suggest that Howe usually got most riled up about things when the wind shifted to the north and the corn fields didn't look so blasted hot. (He was like student editors, actually, though moral indignations are there in the blazing summer, too.)
AS OLD MAN HOWE became old Ed Howe his indignations simmered down somewhat, too. That normally happens to people, even to college editors who once aimed to reform the world in one semester. It's no secret that liberals often become conservative when the juices begin to dry up. William Allen White was an exception, and so is Walter Lippmann, though Lippmann has jumped around on the ideological spectrum like the bouncing ball we used to see in those movie shorts in the thirties. (Note to students: you can let that one pass, because it would be as difficult to explain as it is to tell why we liked Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler.)
What I am laboriously trying to get down on paper is that youth shouldn't expect quite so much of its elders, even those elders who still consider themselves pretty youthful. The young people who have the advantage of being only 20 should accept the fact that their elders' brains are wearing out or their responses slowing down so that they don't quite see the need for getting steamed up about Johnson (if you're a liberal or a conservative), Bobby Baker (if you're a nonsimmer), the war in Viet Nam, the latest march on Bogalusa, or whatever it is that's getting young people steamed up these days.
THAT SAME OLD Ed Howe whose name appeared several typewritten lines ago was rough on the reformers, and he told about some lady reformers who were concerned about suffrage and the New Thought and Taft and the tariff. These ladies were meeting at the home of Mrs. Lysander John Appleton, and Mrs. Appleton (whose busy fingers were in every reform movement) asked one of them what problems of the day seemed to be obsessing her. Came the timid reply: "Well,
what I'm worried about most is what to fix for the next meal."
Well, some of us don't have to fix the next meal, but we have problems that keep us from the kind of earnest consideration we should be giving to escalation in Viet Nam (there seems to be a national political-journalistic compulsion to use the word "escalation," so there it is). As we get older there are minor body ailments, crabgrass in the bluegrass, watergrass in the crabgrass, financial woes, considerations of better jobs or at least better climates, wilt in the lilacs, worms in the tomatoes, cars that ought to be traded, lessons to prepare. And for this member of the older generation a book on old Ed Howe that's got to be written one of these days.
Plus what to fix for the next meal. (On the barbecue grill, that is.)
THOSE OF US who don't really dig what's on your young minds deserve a little tolerance. We thought (some of us) that Johnson was a good president because of his successful legislative program. We thought Roy Wilkins was a forceful civil rights leader but learn that he (and maybe Martin Luther King, too) is an Uncle Tom. We thought the twist was a new dance step. We thought creweats (or whatever you call them) were stylish, and we were proud of our narrow lapels, not knowing that the old double-breasted jobs we bought in 1946 might be considered cool one of these days.
And some of us who were proud of our liberalism find that liberalism is irrelevant. One of my students told me last spring, when I asked him to comment on the basic nature of man, "What man is doesn't matter. All that counts is what he does." Another told me that my good will toward the civil rights movement at KU was unimportant, that I wasn't with it unless I went to Louisiana and helped to register Negroes or build bombed-out churches.
WELL, FOUR MORE WEEKS. The corn is still ripe in north Lawrence, watermelons are coming on, the countryside is green, there are evenings ahead at the Starlight, and bright young journalism students are here to help with the Summer Kansan.
Bear with us, you youth of great courage and moral indignations. Mrs. Lease favored raising less corn and more hell. How she was able to advocate such a platform in pre-air-conditioned Kansas is one of those deep mysteries a Ph.D. candidate in history may fathom one of these years.-CMP
"I Have Returned"
Summer Session
Kansan
111-112 Flint Hall
University of Kansas Student
Newspaper
Telephone UN 4-3198, business
office
UN 4-3646, newsroom
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University Daily Kansan (regular session) founded 1889, became weekly 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.
BOOK REVIEWS
REGIONALISM IN AMERICA, edited by Merrill Jensen (University of Wisconsin Press. $2.50).
One of the distinctive forces in American political and social history has been regionalism, and this excellent book, newly available in paperback, discusses the phenomenon from several standpoints. Students of American history, literature and civilization should find it particularly valuable.
The editor has chosen to select writings that illustrate the question through the following: the concept itself, and its role in history; some selected historic regions of the United States; regional aspects of our culture; the concept of regionalism as a practical force, and the limitations as well as promise of regionalism.
THE EDITOR IS A PROFESSOR at the University of Wisconsin; his writers include such figures as Merle Curti, also of that university; Gordon R. Clapp, famed in the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority; William B. Hesseltine and Fulmer Mood, who have written extensively of regionalism and the Civil War; E. P. Richardson, the art historian; Francis Butler Simkins, southern historian, and many others.
Regionalism is viewed as a force of definite significance in our history, for Fulmer Mood considers the sectional concept as it developed in the 19th century, its place in the conflict between the states, and in the movement westward, its role in our understanding of American life (how many of us still think of the country in those regional terms we learned in grade school courses in geography?)
It is viewed through such selected areas as the South, the Spanish Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Obviously other regions might have been selected; these have been definitely marked for us. A southwesterner in Colorado is quite different from a southwesterner in New Mexico; a child growing up in southern Idaho is much more a part of the Rocky Mountain culture than that of the states to the West.
IN OUR LITERATURE, in our painting, in our architecture, regionalism has been marked, so marked that California architecture in Lawrence looks out of place, so marked that one can identify readily the regional school of painters of the thirties (even though it is unfortunate that they chose to identify themselves more as regionalists than as individualistic painters, which they were.)
In our literature there has been nothing as distinctive in the 20th century as the literature of the South—Faulkner, Caldwell, McCullers, Eudora Welty, Willingham, Tennessee Williams. There also has been the California work of Steinbeck, or the New England writing of Hawthorne a century ago, or the many regional writers of late 19th century who gave so much to our tradition—Eggleston, Garland, E. W. Howe, to name only a few.
The editor has done a special service in pointing to regionalism in such mighty ventures as the TVA, or such still unattempted ventures as a similar plan for our own part of the country. These have been epochal thoughts, needed for a country that is "national" but that still has its distinctive sections that have particular problems of their own.
Here is a remarkable kind of book, consisting of what Aniela Jaffe, the editor, put down in a series of conversations and interviews—and Jung monologues—with the great—but very reticent—psychologist-philosopher. Today's deep interest in Jung is likely to give this book a good deal of popularity.
MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, by C. G. Jung (Vintage, $2.45).
The interviews began in the spring of 1957, and they come out as a kind of autobiography, set down by the editor. Jung himself wrote down recollections of his childhood, at his own suggestion. He later wrote additional chapters. Other chapters were created from conversations Jung had with other doctors and from a seminar that was held in 1925.
The author observes that the book is the only place in Jung's writings where he speaks of God and his personal religious experience. He came to his religion through several routes—curiosity, his conscience as a physician, childhood visions and beliefs.
I AND MY TRUE LOVE, by Helen MacInnes (Crest, 60 cents)—A novel of suspense that starts out with some atrocious grammar in the title. Helen MacInnes normally drops the reader into some mess in Europe; this time the setting is Washington, the situation is diplomatic intrigue. Like her other stories, this one has excitement that will brighten a summer afternoon.
STORIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME, presented by Alfred Hitchcock (Dell, 50 cents)—Hitchcock (or somebody who does the work for him) is now in print with several Dell collections, and the reader will find this an entertaining group of horror stories. Most of the names are not well known, but many readers are likely to recognize the names of Gerald Kersh, John Collier, Shirley Jackson and, obviously, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories are several cuts better than what the old master hands out on his television program.
MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA, by Agatha Christie (Dell, 45 cents); THE BIG FOUR, by Agatha Christie (Dell, 45 cents)Two about Hercule Poirot that go back to 1935 and 1927, respectively. For years Agatha Christie has been the favorite of many readers of mysteries; these are two of the standards.
SEX: THE UNIVERSAL FACT. by Herman B. Chase (Dell Laurel, 50 cents)—A biologist's description of what it's all about. Not for the pornographic-minded. Though the detail is largely from a biological standpoint. Chase freely admits that he has placed a great stress on sex as the dominant fact in life. The author is chairman of the department of biology at Brown University.