Seventy-Sixth Year EDrrED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNWVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS SNCC: Like A Barometer +" :' _Y ere Opinions re Faree ' 20 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MicH. NEWS PHONE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. SATURDAY, JULY 15, 1967 NIGHT EDITOR: DAVID KNOKE Johnson Learns That Caution Must Precede Escalation WELL, WE'RE AT IT AGAIN. President Johnson in a meeting of the minds with his generals and Secretary McNa- mara has called for still more troops to be sent to Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff met with General Westmoreland and the Presi- dent on Thursday, where they expressed their own minds by replying to the Presi- dent's suggestions with a snappy "Yes, sir." And so it is that we will send an un- specified number of new troops to Viet- nam, with the understanding that they will be used to better the ratio between combat and supply troops. While figures on the relative numbers of each vary by more than 25 per cent, depending on whether the newspaper or the adminis- tration figures are used, it is generally agreed that somewhat less than half our troops there are in a true combat status. It will be .interesting to see how long these new troops keep our generals hap- py, and how long it will be until still more are needed-for one reason or an- other. IT IS A GOOD SIGN that the adminis- tration , now feels it necessary to re- assure and forewarn the public when it announces new commitments in Vietnam. Not too many years ago, when the war was still young and the opposition had not yet galvanized, increasing involve- ment was announced almost with an aura of satisfaction. Things have changed now, and even though the news was far from unex- pected, and indeed was almost anti- climactic, the administration still felt it wise to "soften" the blow a little by explaining that it wasn't really a miscal- culation on the part of our generals after all, but just a little book-adjusting to make up for a lot of men who were in the country but weren't doing any fight- ing. Similar to a bookkeeping error that hadn't been counted on, and now must be cleared up. THE ADMINISTRATION went to great lengths to explain why the ratio of fighting men in service status, rather than combat status was less favorable in Vietnam than in Korea. Perhaps this was to keep its image as an efficient admin- istration intact. It doesn't really matter, -the important thing is that Johnson and the Joint Chiefs now consider it nec- essary to explain their actions very care- fully. While the announcement that more men will soon be committed to the fight- ing cannot be welcomed, the caution with which the announcement was made is surely a good sign. Johnson has become aware that the (voting) public is no longer willing to blindly accept whatever decrees and actions the administration may feel expedient, and he is at least making some small effort to let the peo- ple know what is going on. Now, if only the public actively con- tinues to demand explanations for ad- ministration action, perhaps we will be able to proceed in the direction of a government which is responsive to the will of the people even in non-election years. --JIM FORSYTH By GERALD BRUCK Collegiate Press Service (Secopd of Two Parts) Late in March a series of demonstrations took place in the little town of Cordele, the seat of Crisp County Georgia. Negro school children boycotted their segregated school and began daily marches to the center of town. The demonstrations were in part inspired by the SNCC staffers who maintained an office in Cordele. It was the 12th anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court decision to e nd school segregation. In Cordele, children who had been in a segregated first grade in 1954 were graduating from a segre- gated 12th grade in 1966. There was the "deliberate speed" behind white America's good intentions. On May 31, the children marched into the center of town for the third time. They congre- gated on the lawn of the Crisp County Court House. A jeering crowd of whites taunted them as they stood there. Then Rufus Hinton, a 17-year-old member of SNCC, had an idea. "The crackers were yelling,"'he told me later as he hid in Atlanta from the FBI. "And I looked up and I saw that Confederate flag (the state flag which resembles a Confederate flag) and that American flag flying there. I thought, gee, it would really be a nice idea to lower that flag." HINTON LOWERED the flags to half mast, but the children were more enthusiastic; they grabbed them and tried to rip them apart. The news sped out of Cordele: the flags had been desecrated. A federal offense. By the evening of the 31st, a mob had formed at one end of town. The sheriff refused to protect the "agitators" who remained in town, and Hinton had no way to get out. A SNCC car left Atlanta -its purpose to .'ish Hinton out of Crisp County. That night, from the SNCC office, I telephoned local and na- tional news media to read them SNCC's official statement on the occurrence. The statement talked about school integration. The reporters wanted to know about the flag: SNCC was sorry: the flag had nothing to do with the issues. Still the reporters wanted to know about the flag desecration. I could feel their hostility. SNCC wasn't helpful to their news gathering, true. But the press, as it sounded to me over the phone, didn't think too much of SNCC. ("Now is the time to separate the men from the mice," Car- michael said at one point on the Mississippi march. UPI quoted him as saying, "Now is the time to separate the men from the whites.") LATER THAT night, in a slum apartment in Julian Bond's dis- trict, I heard a radio announcer talking about Cordele. A flag had been desecrated. No mention of the schools. No mention of Hinton, cowering in some corner of town, fearful that he would be lynched. Governor Sanders had dis- patched state troopers "to guard the flag pole in front of the Crisp County Court House." "SNCC is like a barometer," SNCC chairman John Lewis told me last March. "It's a reflection, I think, of how black people aie beginning to feel more and more now." And short weeks later, Carmi- chael took over. Carmichael talks about the "racism that pervades every fiber of our society," and I think I have learned something about that, too. One night, after I had had a long talk with Julian Bond in his home, he turned on the television set, and we were presented with a laughing, singing Al Jolson. Bond sat impassively. JULIAN BOND was the main reason I had journeyed to Lown- des County in the first place. I was following him on one of his speaking tours. Lowndes County was on the agenda, and so I drove in with him from Montgomery to the Mount Moriah Church and' Stokely Carmichael. In the spring of my freshman year, on my way to Selma, I saw an old Negro man on the train. I sat down beside him and asked if, he had ever been to the "deep South." He smiled. "Yeah," he said. "What was it like?" I said. "Just like the deep North." "The deep North?" I asked, but he only smiled back at me. There is no escaping the deep North. One of my teachers felt obliged to tell his seminar (inte- grated) that he personally be- lieved that all men were created equal. At the start of this semes- ter, I was beaten up by a group of Negroes in the Hill one night, and was entertained the next morning by a nurse at the Yale infirmary who explained to me that "Martin Luther King is re- sponsible for all this." I AM NO ACTIVIST, and I have no pretensions on that score. I do not devote my time to ame- lioration of the social condition, I do not teach, agitate, organize. Instead, I spend a good deal of my time in the manuscript room of Sterling Library, reading the family letters and diaries of Southern white people who lived before and during the civil war. I try to reconstruct men from the faded handwriting. I see how they treated their slaves and what they thought of their slaves. I see how a young man grew to believe that slavery was a sacred and benevolent institution, I see how they thought and what they feared. I am a magician: I can play with time, I canconstruct them in any image I wish; they are at my mercy. But that is not the point. I am engaged in an historical exercise. I must try to discover the "truth" about them. So I study these let- ters, the residue of their lives, and in the process, I suppose, I shall learn something of what the past was and means, and, through the past, see the present more clearly. It is almost dark when I leave the rlibrary at night, and from time to time, I see groups of small Negro kids walking on the cam- pus. Then, I see the University police arrive and chase them away. After all, they explain, an unidentified someone had turned, in a complaint or "this is private property." The kids run off, exuberant and perhaps a little more angry in- side. The campus cops look at them sternly and I see in their faces the men whose handwriting I have just read. Those ghosts from the past reappear before me. (No, I don't blame the campus cops.) How little things have changed. At such times, I think of Stokely. FILMS Vivid Documentary Depicts Holocaust By KAREN KUGELL used, effectively alternating in "The War Game," now play- style with the hand-held cam- ing at the Campus Theater, is era for the future time of at- a simulated documentary orig- tack and its aftermath. This inally produced by the BBC for technique serves to eliminate use on television. Judged by one any possibility of the film's de- critic to be possibly the most teriorating into a maudlin page- important =film ever made, and ant and builds the irony, ten- winner of an Academy Award, sion, and horror of the situ- it has never been shown on ation. TV nor has it been released in The story of the future prob- Great Britain. able time is divided into the We are fortunate that it is following chronology: the be- being shown in the United gining of the war precipitated States. Although it cannot be by U.S. reaction to the invasion termed entertainment, this film of South Vietnam by the Chi- should be seen by every voter nese Communists; the evacu- and must be seen by every nu- ation and billeting of twenty clear policymaker. per dent of the urben popula- Its subject, nuclear attack tion in an outlying community: and its aftermath in Great preparation for the attack; the Britain, is extremely well han- attack; its aftermath; arnd the dled in documentary style. A conclusions. Each part of the series of standard news media story describes a disaster unto announcements of impending, itself. For example, it is matter- then actual, nuclear attack are of-factly announced during the interlaced with two alternating evacuation scenes that the time sequences, the present pre- evacuation alone, without a nu- war situation which accentuates clear attack would be an econ- unpreparedness and the future omic disaster from which it probable situation in a nuclear would take Britain three to four attack and its+ aftermath. years to recover. N Factual and statistical in- THE PREWAR TIME is formation known from the af- handled on-the-spot interviews termaths of bombings in Dres- which point out the total in- den, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and adequacy of attitudes of civil Nagasaki are used to build the defense, religion, science, med- conclusions of the film. One is icine, government, and pop- presented as a question near the ulace. For these interviews a end: "Would the living envy conventional stable camera is the dead?" The Naked I 4 g :i1 By ANDREW LUGG Mac Arlberg's "I, a Woman" at "The Fifth Forum" is neither interesting nor well made, but it is bound to run for a couple of weeks and get considerable exposure. If I were to tell you that most beautiful nymphomaniacs tend to cause men trouble and end up by becoming little more than paid whores, I would be adding little to your fund of knowledge. Yet this is the storyline of "I". To be sure many fine movies have been made with an even triter plot, but these are re- deemed by beautiful and care- ful filming. Either this, excel- lent visuals, or intelligent story is the absolute minimum re- quirement for a film worth seeing. A DISPLAY OF FLESH, the raison d'etre of "I," is nowhere near good enough. A girl, named Siv is Arlberg's "luxury item." Our director indulgently photo- graphs her undressing, time af- ter time and to the limits of "common decency." All very boring., In "I" we are in the realms of pornotopia - every room looks the same, undressing pro- ceeds identically every time and nothing gets said. The thin veneer of story and the final meeting between Siv and a gentleman who has exactly the same idea--non-involving sex, as regularly as p'ossible-is con- sistently played down in favor of a visual description of "sex- ualis.' Arlberg has the box-of- fice more in mind than he has honesty or desire to comment on Siv's predicament. "I, a Woman" it seems to me is not worth viewing rom a sociological point of view: how far can you go without being censored? Nor do I think, as one friend of mine put it, that this film will set aright the young. After this film they are not very like- ly to be any less straightforward in their sexual dealings. Scandinavia is not the moral center for the New World. Prob- lems of youth and sex (if they must continually be investigated on screen) should be discussed seriously and truthfully. Don't Rock the White Man, Baby Letters to the Editor WHY RIOT, BABY? You don't seem to know- how good you really have it. The American black man is making real progress; his white brothers are giv- ing him his equality. Sure the wheels of dlemocracy are turning slowly, but then3 again, they always have. The schools are being integrated, Negroes are getting more jobs, and the black man is gaining a real respect in the white community. Don't blow it all by rioting; violence can only turn your new friends against you. The white man shudders at the pen- tion of Stokely Carmichadl, or Elijah Mu- hammad, or Malcolm X, or black power, and one scene on the news of the New- ark riots can turn thousands of im- portant whites away from the move- ment. Your true leaders are men who accept responsibility and use their offices with lignity to work within the American system. Follow Martin Luther King, and show your dissatisfaction with American society. Protest if you must, but protest with discretion and understanding, and most important, protest peacefully. NINETY PER CENT of the popula'tion of the United States is white, and he American Negro must be brought to realize that he needs the friendship of the white man to insure his progress. In hort, he must learn to understand that he is necessarily dependent upon the, white man.I Only by exhibiting himself as a law abiding citizen under the most tenuous )f circumstances can he really prove him- self to America, and only then will the rast majority of the whites work to help him reach human equality. The answer does not lie in avoiding his duty in the armed forces. In the Army i.e., Vietnam) the Negro has been able o prove his mettle in the heat of battle. This is one unforeseen windfall of our Asian involvement in that it has provid- ed a ready-made proving ground for the- American Negro. The Vietnam conflict' The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and colegate Press Srvice. Summer subscription rate: $2.00 per term by carrier $2.50 by .mall); $4.00 for entire summer ($4.50 by nail)., Daily except Monday during regular academic school' year. has, indeed, forced many whites to com- prehend the full potential and capabili- ties of the black man. Neither, of course, does the answer lie in the violence of race riots, or their at- tendant looting. Many influential white men have poured a great deal of money into the Negro ghettoes and when they see their hard-worked-for properties and investments go up in flames they are necessarily discouraged from being active in' the civil rights movement. These men who have spent their lives working for -the betterment of the Negro are the ones that the black man should be seeking most to align himself with. Rioting, by necessity, precludes this important white power group from working with the Negro in his quest for civil rights. O, DON'T RIOT, BABY. Learn to ac- cept the principles of American socie- ty and work within that framework to insure a better America for your children and grandchildren. Keep the ball rolling peacefully; it's the only way. -JOHN LOTTIER Bag MICHI WAY THE DAYS of the freshman beanie may be over, but the planners of the orien- tation program still think that the bestt way to gain the respect of the freshman is to insult his intelligence. For the third consecutive year, every blue and gold orientation packet - the true sign of a "freshie"-contains a large blue and gold MICHIWAY campus map. According to the Orientation Office this was designed to give the freshman a "feeling for University tradition by creat- ing humorous slang" descriptions. Is that feeling perhaps a vague nausea or merely disgust? For instance, the map: -Promises 3000 girls on Palmer Field; -Distinguishes Waterman Gym for its "funny odors"; -Advocates "cavorting" in the Arbore- tum; -Suggests those who "flunked" 'are buried on the Diag; -Questions the editorial freedom of The Daily. THE FRESHMAN is entitled to throw MICHIWAY in his favorite "circular file." which he, will surely do. knowing Tuition Hike The poverty level budget un- der which the University must labor in the coming year is at- tributable to the lack of leader- ship displayed by Michigan's absentee governor. I find his performance deplorable and the performance of the University (in granting this individual an honorary degree) disgusting. Through the effective exclu- sion, via pending tuition in- creases, of many talented non-. Michigan residents, the great- ness of; this institution is being challenged. To award an honor- ary degree to the individual most 'esponsible for this situ- ation is extremely ludicrous. If this degree is meant to represent outstanding service, then let the governor display some of it through an imme- diate supplemental appropri- ation preventing the tuition in- creases and its accompanying difficulties. -Roy A. Ashmall President, Graduate Assembly The Psysicist Having recently seen and genu- inely enjoyed the Speech Depart- ment's current presentation of Duerrenmatt's "The Physicists"- certainly a challenging play for any cast - I was nevertheless struck by the clumsy and gratu- itous handling of accents through- out the play. Though this may ap- pear a minor problem to some, in- cluding those professionally con- cerned with the production, it is, I believe, an extremely important one, both practically and aestetic- ally, and always present in a play produced in a translated version. Handled effectively, striking ac- cents can add immeasurably to characterization; botched, as they unfortunately were in "The Phys- icist,' they are annoying and com- pletely distracting. The problems of "accentation" in an American version of "The Physicists" are enough to make a director's head swim. Specifically they are these; you are presenting the English translation of a play written in German by a German- speaking Swiss playwrite, which takes place in. German-speaking that the Rusian is, at some time in the play, assuming a German identity and the American is sometimes assuming an English identity. Assuming, of course, that the director is aiming at a con- vincing "illusion of reality," what principles should be followed with regard to the use of accents? If the meaning of a play draws heavily upon the idiosyncrasies of a specific national or regional locale (as "The Physicists" mean- ing clearly does, i.e. the German- Swiss ancestry of Catherine, the world famous Swiss sanatorium, the beer drinking, burgher police officer, the Gestapo troups), it seems that some attempt should be made to reinforce the physical setting with speech indigenous to that area. The most "true to live" manner in this case would be to perform the play as it was written. that is, with all the German-Swiss speaking German, and the Amer- ican and Russian speaking Ger- man with American and Russian accents (or, when necessary) Eng- lish and German if they are as- suming those identities). But in Ann Arbor this is an impossible burden to place on both the audi- ence and the actors. Some other strategy must be pursued. IT IS COMMON practice when presenting a play of this sort to a "foreign" students simply to make a mechanical inversion of the vari- ables. This would mean that every- one would speak American, the Germans with a German accent, the Russian with a Russian accent (sometimes German), and the American straight (sometimes with an English accent). This has al- ways been a very obvious and simple way to circpmvent the problem. Yet, it is too mechanical, for if the setting too can't also be conviently switched-meaning that the Swiss would become Americans and the Americans Swiss (which, as we have hinted, is thematically impossible in this play) this is no real solution at all. Consider, for example, the absurdity-and we see it so often and for so many different purposes that we never stop to question its authenticity- of having a German-Swiss speak- ing English with a German accent in his own home town! (I am re- minded here of the American tourist, who, unable to speak Ital- ian yet visiting Rome, would ask directions in English with an Ital- ian aent- r hetter the hand of this method is, as it must be, "It's all that can be done." Its advan- tage is that an important differen- tiation in speech is affected,, though, of course, only on a super- ficial level that makes speech to- tally incongruent with the play's setting. The disadvantage of this method is apparent in the current produc- tion of "The Physicists." It requires considerable skill and fine ear (Carl Reiner is a genius at this) to move readily from, say, a Ger- man to a Russian accent as Victor Lazarow is asked to do. Unfor- tunately, this was done poorly, the result being a German-Yiddish hodge-podge. It is also important that should this method be adopt- ed, all the German-Swiss char- acters should speak American with a somewhat equally German ac- cent. This was the greatest in- congruity in the play. Fred Coffin spoke 'in a peculiar mannerism ap- parently of his own choosing, neither German nor American, nor, I regret to say, very compre- hensible in at least one major scene. William Moore, the police- man, couldn't decide if he wanted to speak with any accent or not and resolved the problem, as in- deed; too many problems of this sort are resolved, by simply shout- ing his lungs out at everyone. Margaret Albright, the head nurse, speaks equally bombastic prose. The second nurse, Marsha Fleisch- er, speaks sorority-American; while the head Gestapo officer speaks Pigeon-English. The only master- ful jobs in this respect were done by the two finest actors-William Haushalter as Newton and Kathe- rine Ferrand as the director, who incidently give striking evidence of what consistent accents can ac- complish when effectively devel- oping out of character. THE SOLUTION, it seems, in the case of "The Physicists" is to have all the characters speak American, with certain inevitable mannerisms. Since the fact that even compotent use of accents is nevertheless "untrue of life' offers some justification for its absence. and especially since the majority of the present cast is unable to carry it off anyway, presenting the entire play in American would eliminate the hackneyed and an- noying handling of accents, which, more times than not, detracts from an otherwise very successful pro- ~Dozen' Does It By'A. E. DREYFUSS The new Fox Village Theatre )pened Tuesday with saccharine ceremony and an excellent feature. Ann Arbor Mayor Wen- dell E. Hulcher welcomed Chill Wills, a somewhat schmaltzy representative of "glamorous Hollywood." Wills and two managers of the theatre chain attempted to make the audi- ence welcome to a new "plea- sure palace" with variations on the theme, "we work while you play." The .feature. "The , Dirty Dozei," was worth the wait. The film questions' whether murder of one's countrymen in the name of law is a worse sin than murder of the enemy in time of war. Twelve men, all ,dndemned to twenty years of hard labor at best, to hanging at worst, are given a chance to live and perhaps be pardoned if they succeed in blowing up a chateau in France which houses a group of top German generals. The man in charge of train- ing "the most anti-social bunch of men in the Army" is Major Reisman, portrayed by Lee Marvin. Marvin attacks the trite role of a sensitive-yet- tough commander with profes- sional skill, succeeding in making a character from a type. He takes a Oozen men who are rapists, murderers and morons, and through the force of his own personality molds them into a team of soldiers who must depend on each other to survive. Franco, cynically played by John Cassavetes, is the profes- sional agitator Reisman wisely guides into becoming the leader around whom the "teapm" even- tually forms. Others in the group are Posie, played by Clint Walker, a huge man with a slow but uncon- trollable temper. Jim Brown, tension high, the comic relief well-placed and well-done. The original question was left open, as most of the dozen died a "hero's" death, and thus did not have to return to civilian life, where the skill of killing would not be rewarded. In this sense it is an honest war movie, leaving the audience for once to draw its own conclusions. His' Flat By ANN MUNSTER "Hallelujah the Hills" at Cinema II has been lauded by some moive critics as "a glor- iously fresh experience" and a "witty comedy" but it is un- likely to be particularly ap- preciated by anyone else. Its sole raison-d'etre is the amuse- ment of the cinematic, erudite. Comedy has a legitimate, in- deed a vital function in mo- tion pictures as in every other art form. And though complex, living characters or convincing action is not mandatory even a comedy must provide some semblance of a plot. "Hallelujah the Hills" fails totally -to do this. The court- ship of the young damsel by two mischievous adolescents is a paltry excuse for the pan- oply of parodies and "in- group" jokes which director Mekas half-heartedly endea- vors to weave around it. In fact, it functions merely as a literal jumping-off point, fall- ing by the wayside as the movie progresses and ends - as it started - with a "bang." The viewer is battered about from one parody, tribute, or personally aimed p u n to another, discerning no under- lying purpose except the au- thor's desire for all of these cinematic excesses to be ridi- #1