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THE MICHIGAN DAILY
THURSDAY, MAY 8, 1941
II.
PHE MICHIGAN DAILY
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May Festival
By KARL KARLSTROM
May Festival opened with the Handel concerto
in D major, a piece worthy entirely of beginning
such an occasion. Its sustained spirit, its con-
trasted dynamics, full, deep orchestra, and alter-
nate-voicing placed the audience in a very re-
ceptive mood.
Lawrence Tibbett, famous baritone, next pre-
sented two works, "Arm, Arm, Ye Brave" from
Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, and "Eri Tu" from
from the opera "Masked Ball" by Verdi. The
first was not so good. It seemed to us that Tib-
bett's diction was not as clear as we were accus-
tomed to associating with him, his voice not as
easy. At times, he was lost entirely in the
orchestra.
In the second, a more melodic work, Tibbett
seemed to have regained some of his confidence
and strength, although we thought he reached for
some of the notes, and was not in full control.
The artistry of execution was excellent.
Again the orchestra was heard under the very
able baton of Eugene Ormandy in a presentation
of the Beethoven seventh symphony.
The first movement, with its absolte, flowing
unity, and close texture of harmonies proclaimed
the genius of Beethoven, and the great skill of
Ormandy a'd his orchestra.Difficult, full of rapid
changes in dynamics, intricate entries, it was
done beautifully. The second movement, we
think we have never heard presented as well.
The deliberate, soft, hushed melody that intro-
duces the movement, shifting from section to
section, climactic and dying-away, reworded and
spun from choir to choir, was thoroughly musi-
cal in the most complimentary sense.
The third movement, fell just a little short
of the beauty of the second. We felt that the
string sections had lost some of their touch with
each other, missing the delicacy of the lyrical
passages.
The last movement was a dance, fitting only
in a certain degree. Mr. Tibbett retrned to the
platform with "Cassio's Dream," and "Credo"
both of which selections are from the opera
"Otello" by Verdi. We found him in fine shape.
His tones were richer, rounder, and more pene-
trating than in the preceding works.
Closing the formal portion of the concert, the
Philadelphia Orchestra played for excerpts from
the third act of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger."
The sustained song of Wagner, the climactic
changes, te unresolvent quality, were brought
forth very ably.
Ei
Emile Gele
Robert Speckhard
Albert P. Blaustein
David Lachenbruch
Bernard Dober .
Alvin Dann
Hal Wilson
Arthur Hill
Janet Hiatt
Grace Miller
ditorial Staff
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James;
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Evelyn
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iM
NIGHT EDITOR: DAN BEHRMAN
The editorials published i The Michi-
gan Daily are written by members of The
Daily staff and represent the views -of the
writers only.
On Saving Liberty,
Here And Abroad,.
SENATOR CLAUDE PEPPER in-
formed the Senate day before yes-
terday that there are two things the world "needs
,o know" from the United States: "That Amer-
lea is determined that tyranny shall die and
when we have saved liberty we shall help to nur-
ture it to maturity in all the world."
Coming from Senator Pepper at this time these
words sound rather strange and out of place.
one might be so moved as to ask the gentleman
from Florida if he "knows" what is happening
in his own home town of Miami to the very
"liberty" which he would have Americans fight
on foreign soil to "save."
IT IS IN HIS CITY that the authorities no
jonger feel freedom of speech and freedom
of assembly essential to a democratic state. It
is there that people are no longer allowed to
speak out and say what they think - especially
if they question the expediency of all-out aid
to Britain or the advisability of war.
Only last week Miami oficials refused the
America First Committee permission to conduct
a rally in any of the public meeting places.
The refusal was based on the charge that the
organization is a subversive one because of its
opposition to war and because its views are con-
trary to "national policy."
"Due to the criticism in the press and by the
radio of the national organization," one commis-
sioner explained, "it wAs considered that they
(the America First Committee) are, at the pres-
ent time, considered as a subversive element."
O IT NOW seems to be a treasonous act to
speak out for peace or to oppose thepolicies
9f the current administration in Washington.
Is this the kind of "liberty" Senator Pepper
would have us save - a kind in which one, and
only one, side of an argument may be presented?
For the other side of the question is being
heard in Miami. Its proponents had no difficulty
i obtaining the use of the city's largest public
meeting place, Bayfront Park. One of the Flori-
da commissioners, who voted against allowing the
America First Committee to meet, saw to this.
According to the Detroit Free Press, the com-
missioner is chairman of the local chapter of the
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the
Allies and, in this capacity, he arranged a public
appearance for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in which
Fairbanks presented the aid-to-Britain and pro-
war arguments
THERE was nothing wrong with this. In fact
it was entirely as it should be . Both the com-
missioner and the movie star are entitled to their
ppinions They have the right to express those
opinions, and the people of Miami (and of all
America) should hear their case. However, the
people also have a right - the right, as set forth
in the Constitution of the United States-to hear
the proponents of the other side expound their
cause.
This editorial is not a defense of the America
First Committee, nor is it an attack on the ad-
vocates of intervention. It is a plea for sanity,
liberty and democracy at home. There are earn-
est and sincere patriots on both sides. Yet it
is amazing and regrettable what little concern
is being shown over incidents similar tothat in
Miami.
rTHE SINCERE INTERVENTIONIST is the first
LETTERS
TO T HE E DITOR
To the Editor:
I WAS REQUESTED recently by President
Ruthven to examine with Dean Stason the
recently revised, or possibly supposedly only codi-
fied, by-laws of the Regents. As the Dean (i.e.
Provost) had difficulty in locating me, I decided
to begin my examination of these by-laws in the
copy belonging to the office of the Dean of the
Literary College. As it may be suspicioned-and
indeed it seems to me I have definitely been sub-
jected to suspicion-of having divulged informa-
tion about the by-laws, I request the Editor in-
volved in the writing of /this article (page one,
Michigan Daily, May 7, 1941) to state that this
suspicion is unfounded.
--Louis C. Karpinski
From the Editor:
AT THE REQUEST of Professor Karpinski I
wish to state that he was in no way connect-
ed, and further knew nothing about, the source
of the quotations from the revised by-laws of
the Regents (approved Dec. 13, 1940) in the
front page story of May 7.
Further, I wish to say that The Daily is not
obligated to disclose sources of information which
have been reecived in confidence, nor is it obli-
gated to submit to questioning to obtain such
sources, if possible by process of elimination.
I might further add that the by-laws of the
Regents are a matter of public knowledge, and
quotations from them cannot be construed as
taken in bad faith.
-Robert Speckhard, Editorial Director
sented with no fear of retaliation from the
state. A true American and a true democrat must
necessarily agre with Wendell Phillips who said,
"Men are educated and the state uplifted by al-
lowing all - everyone - to broach all their mis-
takes apd advocate all their errors. The commun-
ity that will not protect its most ignorant and
unpopular member in the free utterance of his
opinions, no mater how false or hateful, is only
a gang of slaves!"
MANY PEOPLE in America today are forget-
ting or disregarding this fact. They are say-
ing that democracy must be 'amended' for the
duration of the emergency. This is not true! De-
mocracy need not b, shelved whenever it con-
fronts a crisis; democracy cannot be shelved if
it is to last. We cannot comie back months or
years later and find it as we left it. It must
be kept in continual running order and must be
continually improved upon if it is to remain in
existence.
Today we are being asked by the interven-
tionists, and especially by Senator Pepper, to
fight for "liberty" in foreign lands. To be con-
sistent these persons must stand for increased
liberty and democracy in this country. They
should, therefore, rise up in a storm of protest
against the Miami incidert and similar occur-
rences:
Chinese Student
Says Democracy
Lives In China
A Reply To
Senator Wheeler
By PAUL LIM-YUEN
IN HIS CLEVERLY WORDED remarks Sen-
ator Wheeler made a violent indictment of
China. I am here concerned with stating clearly
and candidly what I consider to be a very nec-
essary refutation of his gross misrepresentation
of fact with regard to the present state of de-
mocracy in China and the worthwhileness of sal-
vaging such an existing state in terms of the
world picture.
THE SENATOR has frequently in the past con-
demned the manner of making broad sweep-
ing statements by his fellow statesmen without
a full knowledge of the facts. He states that
some of his opponents know too little to know
that they don't know. Yet the Senator states
himself that he spent only five short months in
China, a nation with over 40 centuries of cul-
tural traditions and a wealth of meaning in
its civilization known only by experts through
long periods of sojourn in China, and he finds
himself qualified ot come back and categorically
and uncompromisingly cry: "There is no de-
mocracy in China!" How utterly unfounded his
allegation is may be indicated in part by his ex-
periences in China as recounted by himself. In
the first place, he visited China in 1927, a China
very different from the China of 1941. In the
second place, he spent much of his time in North
China, the erstwhile stronghold of the Manchu
imperial regime. In the third place, he appealed
for what scraps of information he possessed from
the conversation he had then with Chang Tso
Lin-then China's greatest war lord and sym-
bol of China's unwanted past. It is as if I had
been inducted into the way of living of this na-
tion by spending five months living in the Loop
area in Chicago. I would then come out at the
end of that period and tell my fellow country-
men: "There is nothing but crime and poverty
in America."
SENATOR WHEELER STATES that in his ex-
tensive travels in China, he found nothing
but extreme suffering and poverty among the
masses, and he infers that the best contribution
that America can make to the solution of this
problem is to stop sending any aid to China (not
stating whether he favoured continuing - and
possibly increasing? - the existing flow of Amer-
ican munition to the Japanese war machine
that it may continue to impoverish and en-
slave and destroy more millions of humanity
in China.)
OF COURSE there has been suffering and pov-
erty in China, as there has been in any other
nation. Today thre is infinitely more. Indeed there
are now at least 35 million refugees wandering
across the war-scarred face of China. I do not,
I think, presume too far to remind the Senator
that China's tremendous refugee army has been
created with the aid largely of American-made
bombs and guns and steel. What matters it, if
it is a debt or a courtesy America owes to
China to extend her whatever aid she can, let
alone stop the flow of lethal weapons to Japan,
Far Eastern partner of Nazi Germany.
OF COURSE, there is no ideal democracy in
China today. But is there elsewhere such a
democratic model of perfection? In America?
The Senator himself would be the first to de-
plore the lack of democratic forces in America,
yet he would also be the first, and commendably
so, to cry vociferously for the defense of this
American democracy if it were attacked, even in
its state of imperfection. Democracy is a dy-
namic, a continuing, a never-ending process.
It is not a static state of affairs waiting
for men like Senator Wheeler suddenly to dis-
cover or fail to discover it in its full-fledged
maturity. There is much not yet accomplished
in China that the Chinese leaders themselves
would be the first to deplore, but the overwhelm-
ing historic evidence of the past few decads
has unequivocally indicated the orientation of
China's political development in the right di-
rection. The growth of political institutions, in-
deed, was arrested only by the Japanese in-
vasion, and even today the idealism of democracy
is a living and a growing spiritual force among
the people. Countless evidences attest to the
truth of this statement. Universal education, a
sure sign of democracy, has made phenomenal
strides under governmental jurisdiction and is
making unbelievable progre ss now, during the
war years. (What democratic nation at war or
facing war can parallel this?) The unprecedented
growth of the Industrial kCooperative Move-
ment, something Senator Wheeler must know
very little about, is another milestone in China's
democratic development. In the political sphere,
no matter what may be said about the abnormal
conditions obtaining in wartime, theredoes exist
a Constitution of the Republic of China, founded
upon the famous revolutionary principles of
the San Min Chu I of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Quite
recently, there met in Chungking the People's
Political Council, to discuss national policies.
Interestingly, this body had at its head, not one.
Chairman, but a presidium of five, four of whom
were non-Kuomintang. The Council was marked
by a greater measure of tolerance to opposing
political views and programs than might have
been thought possible in war-time. It even dis-
cussed the Kuomintang-Communist controversy
in an open manner. It recommended that the
new local government system should be directed
to provide outlets for public opinion and every
insurance of advance towards democracy and
that the People's Congress be convened as soon
as conditions permit. (This Congress was sched-
uled to convene four years ago, but failed to do
so owing to the Jananese invasion).
War Poetry
As Others
See I , .
IN THE FOURTH SCENE of that moving and muddled
drama, "There Shall Be No Night," Miranda Val-
konen says to the young American soldier-poet: "When
I was a young girl my greatest hero was Rupert Brooke.
Maybe now that you're here-and have all this experi-
ence-maybe you'll write as he did." The young man
demurs: "I'm afraid I could never write like Rupert
Brooke even if I were good. He was always singing of
the heroism of war." "And you see it is unheroic?"
"Yes, Mrs. Valkonen, I do." It is doubtful whether
many young American poets would confess to an ad-
miration for Brooke. Moreover, it was before Brooke
had had any experience of war that he glorified it in
verse. Had he lived, his disillusion might have found
an expression that would have won him the suffrage
of the moderns. In any event, it is certain that the
attitude of the poets of 1941 is different from that of
the poets of 1914.
The men who descended into the trenches a quarter
of a century ago went with a profound ignorance of
what they were to face, and with a serene, if vague,
sense of what they were defending. A good deal of the
verse written at the start of the conflict came from the
Georgians. Its tone was quiet, its manner traditional,
and it was marked by a tenacious trust in a rural econ-
cmy, governing a rural habit of mind. It mts the land,
the dear English earth, that received the tribute of the
poets repeatedly in those first month. When Brooke
wrote:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever Englan,
he was imagining a transubstantiation of that foreign
soil into English dust. Masefield's "August, 1914" be-
gins, typically, with a picture of a quiet cornfield at
night, and bespeaks the faith that "above these fields
a spirit broods . . . A sense . . . Of the lone Downland
. Loved to the death." Even Ford Madox Ford (then
Hueffer), for all his sympathy with outlandish fashions,
spoke of love of one's land as "a flame . . . a madness
. the great passion of yoir life."
Some of the most lyrical voices were silenced
abruptly. Wilfred Owen, who has achieved the distinc-
tion of an "ancestor," was killed just one week before
the Armistice. He lived long enough to see of what
shoddy stuff the glory that had enchanted Brooke was
made. He never quite overcame a Keatsian lushness,
but he was a fine technician, whose experiments were to
prove useful to later men, and whose grave lines ex-
pressed the horrors, the anguish, the disgust that he
shared with his more outspoken fellows. In the frag-
mentary notes that prefaced his posthumous book, he
insisted that its subject was "War, and the pity of
War," and that the poet's first duty was to be truthful.
That is the burden of his most memorable poem,
"Strange Meeting," which gains pathos if not impres-
siveness from being unfinished. pity was a recurrent
note in the war poems of Wilfred Wilson Gibson, pity
and an unblinking candor. Robert Graves set down
with grim verisimilitude a picture of a dead Boche that
was "a certain cure for lust of blood," and phophesied
more bluntly than Owen that a new war was coming,
which "new foul tricks unguessed before" would "win
and justify."
The bitterness of his satire was to be a strong ele-
ment in the draughts compounded by better craftsmen.
The spiritual and physical horrors of war were the chief
themes of those who spoke as soldiers first and as poets
afterwards. Scarcely any looked into the deeper causes
of the evil. A notable exception is Alan Porter, who
wrote as early as May, 1917:
vain are the wounds, vain is the sorrow, vain
Courage and sacrifice and hope and death.
Peace is the subtler countenance of war,
The two one witness. When the world's at peace,
Peace shall be poverty and wounds and sorrow,
Courage and sacrifice and hope and death. ,
The major poets had little to say. Yeats had declared
that he thought it better "that in times like these A
poet's mouth be silent." Pound devoted two pages of
"Mauberley" to the pitiless truth:
Dicd some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor"
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
comie home, home to a lie,-
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
£ usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Eliot, stumbling through the pocked Wasteland, spoke
not of, war, but of its "subtler countenance," examining,
as his successors were to do with more sardonic solici-
tude, the blemishes on the face of peace, the nervous tic
of her eye, the paralytic grin. For the most part the
Americans, who had been removed from the struggle for
years, were neither so elated about the adventure that
war promised nor so promptly disillusioned. Sandburg,
one of the more vocal, wrote in an elegiac strain about
the men on their long job of killing, "Fixed in the drag
of the world's heartbreak," not without hope that the
kings would be "kicked under the dust" and the com-
mon man would fight in another war for "'great causes
not yet dreamed." Frost, building his bonfire of brush-
wood that illumined so sharply the New England scene,
paused to observe: "War is for everyone, for children
too," and then went on with his quiet labors. It was
only after the peace to end peace was signed that the
younger men, following Eliot on his stony pilgrimage,
cried out, now in accents of suppressed hysteria, now
in the subdued tones of despair, against the world of
grotesque paradoxes, crazy shames and gutted values
that the war had bequeathed to the victors as well as
to the vanquished.
Those poets who grew up in the post-war years, too
young to have suffered from the painful readjustments
required of their seniors, not carrying their burden of
deluded hopes, faced the task before them with youth's
aggressiveness and youth's wistfulness. Alive to the
techniques of Yeats, Pound and "Eliot, of Owen and
their greater "ancestor" Hopkins, they explored the
wasteland with a will to clear away the wreckage and
build the new Jerusalem in England's green and pleas-
ant land. Such poets as Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis,
W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender went to school to
the Social Muse, but having studied Freud as well as
Marx, they were concerned not merely with the estab-
lishment of a new order, but also with the necessity for
defeating the self-regarding, inverted attitude that, as
younger members of "the Old Gang," they were them-
selves inclined to adopt. Their medicine for a diseased
society, their weapon against their own weaknesses,
was satire, although even Auden's buffoonery gradually
gave place to a more searching and sensitive attack
upon the evils around and within.
It was not long, however, before these poets, and the
Americans who were their fellow travelers, confronted
the fact that they were living not in a post-war but in a
pre-war, and suddenly in a war-ridden, world. They
had looked for revolution. They expected fighting,
Their verse, even when it deals with more private
matters, abounds in the imagery of modern wafare:
severed wires, tangled scrap-iron, spies, airmen. But
though they could imagine, they were not prepared for,
a war in which the aims would be as obscure, ann the
line-up of forces as ambiguous as in this one. A short
anthology of recent verse for these times written by
English poets bears an Address to the Reader in which
he is told that "This war must be thought to a finish: it
concerns thinkers as no other war ever did." It has not
yet been thought through, and this may well be one of
'the reasons why the poets, aware of that necessity,
unable to formulate their position, tend to withdraw
into a private corner, to write more personal poetry
than before. The anthology mentioned above opens
with a poem hailing the unborn historian whose song
"shall enshrine our despair, Reveal our mad story, and
from its present confusion Discover the hope that
guides us toward his birth." Another poet wishes today
were yesterday. A third sees love and hope approach
"Like tide . . . For heavy retreat." Yet anpther speaks
of the solitude that eases bewilderment, and lets the
poet forget "nations dying, And Europe without a
friend." Nowhere in the boot, nor in recent poems I have
read elsewhere, is there an affirmation comparable to
that with which Brooke and his fellows greeted the war
of 1914. Nor is there the savage indignation of the later
years; only great pity and a new weariness, for boredom
appears to be not the least of this war's cruelties.
There is an ancient Egyptian poem in which the
singer recites the troubles that attend' every sort of
worker, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the fisherman,
and declares: "I have seen violence, I have seen vio-
lence, give thy heart after letters." The poets of 1941
have seen violence undreamed of by the men of 1914.
If they give their hearts after letters, it is because they
know that poetry, though it is no substitute for anti-
aircraft guns, is the stronghold of that awareness which
alone gives the guns a meaning. But at this juncture
the poets can do no more than celebrate awareness, and
in troubled accents. Unlike their predecessors, they un-
derstand that this war is no joyous adventure, no cru-
ade, but a dirty job, and that the winning of the war
may be less difficult than the wipning of the peace,
The Soviet betrayal of communism more than any other
one factor appals and disarms them, for if the socialist
fatherland has begotten a dictatorship from which
Nazism has pulled the disguise, in what shall they put
their trust? They know, too, that England does not go
Writer compares poetry of 1914 and 1941; cannot find
strong affirmation of hope in World War II poets - pity,
weariness characterize poets of today.
Babette Deutsch, in the New Republic, April 21, 1941
Then And Now
- { 4into
the fight with clean hands. Had
because she has failed to develop a
perfect democracy in those few years.
These people forget that American
democracy in its infancy had not a
fraction of the stupendous problems
China faces, and it required a Civil
War nearly a century after the Rev-
olution to lay firm the foundations
of American democracy. Today, some
165 years later,, no one would deny
nor wish it to be denied that Amer-
ica has yet a long way to go towards
the ultimate goal. So also, undoubted-
ly, there are great obstacles ahead to
thwart the attainment of universal
democracy in China, and thegreatest
of these is the Japanese war machine.
IN THE SENATOR'S SPEECH, how-
ever, he not only voiced a great
untruth about China, but also com-
mitted an equally great sin of omis-
sion. Not only did he fail callously,
at any moment to decry and denounce
the criminal attack upon China by
Japan with all its attendant tragedy
to a peace-loving people, but he also
failed to remind himself of what a
Fascist and dominant Japan would
mean to the future of the Pacific and
of America. In his misdirected zeal,
fh Qn n r%"A m c "i -nlam -a
if left unchecked by these "undemo-
cratic nations."
CHINA today suffers untold pain
, during the war years, but she
carries on with unflagging spirits
and indeed in a growing sense of
strengthened unity and hope, because
she DOES believe in the high ideals
of justice and liberty and humanity,
because she IS the bulwark of peace
and democracy in the Orient. On the
other hand, the present Japanese re-
gime is the exact antithesis of this
high idealism, and stands for the ful-
fillment of the Tanaka plan, the Far
Eastern equivalent of the Haushofer
plan, which demands the relentless
striving up the path of empire by a
brutal war machine towards Mnilitary
and economic hegemony, meanwhile
menacing the interests and security of
every nation bordering upon the
Pacific. As such, it can know no ceas-
ing except in defeat.
THE ONLY WAY to insure the tri-
umph of democratic, peaceful and
constructive forces in the Far East, is,
in my belief, to insure the triumph
of a China dedicated to the creation
and furthering of those forces in the
Pacific area and in the world.
not her rulers given aid and com-
fort to the 4enemy, the war would
wear a different complexion. The
poets can speak only out of their be-
wilderment and pain, unless and un-
til the war aims are declared, and
proved to answer the needs of the
common mal and the desires of the
just.
That Symbol On
Our U.S. Dime
I IS to the credit of the American
people's good sense that nobody
proposed recently chopping down the
Japanese cherry trees which have
been making Washington's spring-
time glorious. Such a proposal, to
show disapproval of Japan's invas-
ion of China, was actually made a
few years ago.
The 1941 version of this narrow
spiritcomes from the women's di-
vision of the Committee of Americans,
which protests against further coin-
age of dimes bearing the fasces, the
fascist symbol.
Long before the followers of Muss-
olini adopted it, this was an honored