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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Feb. 24, 1965
Declaration Still Good
(Editor's Note: The following is a prize-winning editorial written by James W. Scott of the Kansas City Star. Scott won a George Washington Honor medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. The editorial below is reprinted from the Kansas City Times.)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.—That whenever . . . government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it...
On July 4, 1776, the bold words of the Declaration of Independence seemed to be not much more than that—bold words. At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, modern history had seen no mightier nation than Great Britain. Her only rival, France, had been humiliated. Her empire was spreading over the face of the earth, and British men-of-war churned the seas.
Yet here were these colonials—weak, disorganized and angry—grandly calling themselves the United States of America, in a radical document that dared to speak of the "natural" rights of men.
The nation against which the declaration was directed through centuries had been, itself, the incubator of a gradually growing insistence that men had natural rights, that government was intended to be the servant of the people and not that the people were to be the servants of their government. The words of Thomas Jefferson echoed the philosophy of the 17th century Briton, John Locke, who said that men entered into government for convenience and protection of their natural rights. Locke argued that the contract was between the governed and the ruler; that if the ruler violated that contract, then such an agreement could be broken by the government. And he added that because revolutions every few years are impractical, the sovereignty ought to be vested in representative government.
This concept, of course, lies at the base of our two centuries of growth. It undergirds both our liberty and our political and economic advancement. The Declaration of Independence technically is not law, but it reflects the spirit that is the foundation of our Constitution and free society. In it already were planted the seeds of the institutions of government and the great civilization that had evolved upon the North American continent. Its ideal finds contemporary expression in the civil rights law of 1964. Its assumption of individual independence, asserting the dignity and rights of man, remains a perpetually new and fresh idea in a world that still knows "absolute despotism" over so much of its surface.
Yet, if the prospects appear grim today for new nations and ancient people, they were no brighter nearly two centuries ago for the 3 million men, women and children clinging to the edge of a vast continent, challenging the greatest national power then in existence. The strength of the Declaration of Independence lay not in its brash courage, but in the universality of the ideal it framed. Today, the pull of that ideal—both at home and abroad—is as powerful as ever and just as meaningful. We Americans of 1964 should be proud to have our performance judged by the principles laid down in one of the greatest of all human manifestos.
- James W. Scott
The People Say
To the Editor:
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK Mr. Noland for his brilliant and authoritative editorial interpretation of the programs and policies of the Student Peace Union which appeared in the Kansan Feb. 22. We only regret that he is apparently not aware of the SPU Statement of Purpose which has been circulated on this campus, nor of any official policy statement which SPU has issued.
The purpose of the recent SPU demonstrations, both the one in Kansas City to which Mr. Noland alludes and the one last Saturday which lasted for $1_{2}$ hours on the campus and city streets of Lawrence (of which Mr. Noland was apparently not aware), was to lodge a protest against U.S. escalation of the war and to encourage students and other citizens to become aware of the issues at stake in Viet Nam. The latter demonstration was at least partially successful in that it elicited an active response from "unidentified" (to use the words of the Lawrence Daily Journal World) students who felt motivated to counter-demonstrate with signs reading "Expand the War to North Viet Nam (But Don't Take Me)",
"Increase the Draft," and a rallying around cry of "Let's Go North."
The SPU is a study and action group which includes "Goldwaterites" (using Mr. Noland's term), former servicemen, and armed services dependents, among others, with their correspondingly diverse opinions. The group is broadly based, having been formed by concerned students to study the problem of war, particularly in the nuclear age, and alternatives to it.
Mr. Noland was correct in that we do label the U.S. the "aggressor" in Viet Nam, since the United States' 23,500 troops (according to Time, Feb. 19, p. 17) constitute the only foreign military force in any part of Viet Nam and since the U.S. is now carrying the war into the independent nations of North Viet Nam and Laos, both of which were established by the same Geneva Conference (1954) that established South Viet Nam and Cambodia as well.
We invite the UDK staff or other interested or "unidentified" students to attend any SPU meeting to familiarize themselves with this
organization which is often misrepresented on campus. We challenge the moral, intellectual, and philosophical bases of the opinions of those who seriously support further escalation of the war in Viet Nam, and we renew the thus-far-unaccepted invitation which SPU has repeatedly extended in the past to debate in a serious forum the specific issues currently at stake in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia.
Mike Jennison,
Wiesbaden, Germany,
sophomore
Tim Miller,
Wichita senior,
SPU steering committee
Dear Sir:
GARY NOLAND'S EDITORIAL on the war in Vietnam in Monday's UDK surely was a courageous affirmation of administration policies. Perhaps Gary has derived his fearless posture from a careful study of the current American courage to persevere in a mistake after it has been recognized or our courageous use of napalm bombs and torture to "free" the people of South Vietnam.
Western Civ. students who remember reading "1984" should not find it difficult to understand how Mr. Noland can make a sharp distinction between the Soviet involvement in Hungary in 1956 and our involvement in Vietnam; according to current Pentagon doublethink, Hungary was a case of "intervention," while the Bay of Pigs and South Vietnam are examples of "liberation." Perhaps we will soon be able to distinguish dirty rotten Communist torture from good clean Democratic torture.
Noland would have us "stand up to an aggressor which has confronted the United States since the end of World War II." I have not heard that there are any Russians or Chinese in South Vietnam, and if what is meant is that we must struggle against communism in the underdeveloped nations, we might find that democracy and prosperity are more effective weapons than unpopular military dictatorships and napalm bombs. American foreign policy is obsessed with the folly that we can impose freedom at the point of a bayonet. Such blind irresponsibility could prove fatal to both our struggle for democracy and humanity's struggle to avoid World War III.
Charles Hook
Charles Hook President, K.U.S.P.U. Lawrence sophomore
Dailij Ifänsan
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EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Leta Roth and Gary Noland Co-Editorial Editors
Don Black
Don Black ... Managing Editor
Bobbie Bartelt, Clare Casey, Marshall Caskey, Fred Frailey, Assistant Managing Editors; Judy Farrell, City Editor; Karen Lambert, Feature-Society Editor; Glen Phillips, Sports Editor; Janet Chartier, Telegraph Editor; Harry Krause, Picture Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Tom Fisher Business Manager
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"Now, Students, Do You All Have Your Ink Bottles And Other School Supplies?"
BOOK REVIEWS
FILM WORLD, by Ivor Montagu (Pelican Original, $1.45).
Interest in the motion picture has reached the stage of the cult, and those of us who are brash enough to praise the great entertainment films of the thirties may get an indignant letter from the partisans of the New Wave, Bergman or Kurosawa. Poor old Bosley Crowther is criticized frequently in the New York Times for not being avant-garde, and in some circles one not only doesn't see American films, he doesn't even admit their existence.
Some readers will find Ivor Montagu's "Film World," a Pelican original, a nit too esoteric, but there actually is something here for the various categories of film-lovers. Montagu considers the film in its technical sense, as an art form, as a blockbuster industry, as a way of communicating ideas. All would seem important. You may look at "The Informer" as an example of the art of John Ford, but how can you ignore the comment that the film makes?
Montagu even considers the motion picture from its money-making standpoint. It is gross, of course, to mention "The Ten Commandments" and "Gone with the Wind" on the same page as Bergman and Antonioni, but these two American films probably have had far greater social impact than the toney art films to which many people restrict themselves.
Censorship is another important aspect of the film that Montagu treats. The film probably is censored more than any other form of communication. Montagu recalls the failure to make an honest film of "An American Tragedy" in the early thirties; he recognizes the pressures that are present when one tries to say something controversial.
Consider one final point about the role of the film. Montagu comments on Charles Laughton's fixing for all time the image of Captain Bligh on the popular imagination, on how many moviegoers will always see Paul Muni when the name Juarez or Pasteur is mentioned. It seems to me absolutely imperative that the social role, the educational role of the motion picture be given important consideration along with camera angles, innovations, shading and all the rest—CMP
Except for some pretty sticky commentary that is an outgrowth of the legendry and myth already surrounding the late President, this is a pleasant little book to have around. What Booton Herndon does is to provide a running commentary that introduces us to some of the things John F. Kennedy said, in his speeches and otherwise. There are good informal photographs accompanying the text.
1 1
THE HUMOR OF JFK, edited by Booton Herndon (Gold Medal, 50 cents).
If you need a sampling to get you to buy the book (Gold Medal is sure to do well without your 50 cents, but you may want to pay it), there are these:
About the job—"I have a nice home, the office is close by, and the pay is pretty good."
About commenting on comments by Goldwater—" . . . he himself has had a busy week selling TVA and giving permission to—suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons, attacking the President of Bolivia while he was here in the U.S., involving himself in the Greek elections. So I thought that it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him."
Speaking to students at Harvard—"I am here to go over your grades with Doctor Pusey—and I'll protect your interests."
About his father paying to get him elected—"I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy—Dear Jack—Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide."