, THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 1951 THE MICHIGAN DAILY t mommommommw a-rrr.M h IFC Ruishing Rules JIL J& *- JML M6 APPEARING ON this page yesterday was a categorical denunciation of the Inter- Fraternity Council rushing regulations which perhaps needs some rebuttal. The crux of the criticism seemed to be the fact that the IFC made a farce of its original rushing registration deadline by permitting 114 men to sign up late. This, it is claimed, permitted and even encour- aged fraternities to hide men till the last minute, then quickly and quietly sign them up and pledge them so that other fraternities could not have a chance to rush/rthem, thus, contradicting the spirit of the rushing rules. However, this analysis overlooks the vital fact that the IFC's principal function is to obtain as many fraternity pledges as pos- sible. After all, the IFC is but an organiza- tion of fraternities acting for the fraterni- ties. Therefore, it follows that, especially in times like these when many Greek orgapi- zations are shivering before the spectre of draft-emptied houses, the IFC is justified in any little ruses it can use short of out- right high-jacking, to get men to join up. Obviously many fraternities went out on their own and persuaded men not signed up for rushing to come around and visit them. Even if other houses were not given a fair chance at these men, the fact that students who had not planned to rush were swept into fraternities was to the advantage of the' IFC. The code of rushing rules which have been drawn up by the IFC were not intend- ed to, supersede in any way the primary function of rushing-getting as many men as possible. These regulations were aimed only at equalizing as far as possible the at- tractions of big and small, rich and im- poverished fraternities. If fraternity A, composed of Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, is able to take their rushees to the Detroit Yacht Club for a rousing get-together, while, fraternity B is able to offer only stale cook- ies, an inequitable distribution of pledges is likely to result. Some restraint upon this is all that is desired. In a lesser sense, the IFC was trying to encourage rushees to see as many houses as possible, but in the many marginal cases which might well not rush at all, anj interpretation of the rules which toler- ates limited rushing is necessary-i.e., late rushing registration. This is not meant to be an impassioned defensq of the entire rushing system as! presently constituted. It is far from ideal, promotes a detestable sort of hearty in-j sincerity. However, the rules which have grown up around the existing system make a good deal of sense if their underlying pur- pose is kept in mind when they are being in- terpreted. -Crawford Young "How Could You Kids Lose Your Sense Of Values?" <'YCQAVS0 47 /?/A ,S"AMPBU S EMY To pp 1tJ / A a sS SL& 14 r > ~~fROI' U.,Ayy f 11 /0 '4". tettepj TO HE EDITOR The Daily welcomes communications from its readers on matters of general interest, and will publish all letters which are signed by the writer and in good taste. Letters exceeding 300 words in length, defamatory or libelous letters, and letters which for any reason are not in good taste will be condensed, edited or withheld from publication at the discretion of the editors. McGee Case . To the Editor: I FOR ONE am sick and tired of hearing some say, "No, you can't do anything about it, there's nothing you cando; nope, you can't help Willie McGee." Willie McGee is a Negro, and he lives in Mississippi: you know what that means. He was accused of raping a white woman, an all- white jury found him "guilty" in 2 minutes, and he's been in jail for 5 years while the State of Mississippi battled his defense lawyers and the U.S. Supreme Court. Now Willie McGee is to die on March 20. But we CAN stop the lynchers. President Truman has the pow- er to intervene to get a fair trial for Mr. McGee. But he won't do it unless the people make him. Send him letters, send him tele- grams: I mean every one of you. A post-card will do; just say, "A stay of execution for Willie Mc- Gee! Get him a fair trial!" Tru- man knows what the score is,but he won't act unless we make him. I mean every one of you. -David R. Luce, Grad., * * * father purchase release from ob- ligations to his children? Can di- rect and indirect costs of those obligations be measured in dol- lars? How about ethics? Our profes- sors of philosophy will agree that but few ethical codes are formally stated in writing. Those' codes are, however, well-recognized in our heritage and culture. Unethi- cal engineers use insufficient ce- ment with concrete aggregate- or chisel on government contracts Note this: Mr. Lapham, ia spite of prolonged verbal examina- tion, recognized absolutely no ob- ligation to the United States until after he was informed of the grounds for committee action. Yet the primary function of our uni- versity is to build character! Our country is fighting intoler- able ideologies in. order to permit world-wide recognition of the primacy of the individual. It is the obligation of every citizen who partakes of the benefits and protection afforded by his nation to help preserve the foundations of its government. In counseling with Mr. Lapham, I learned that he claims to be of 4r C 1f / (C i . _.. !'°i' .N 0-4 nt$ --g,#- dT*4A*4ft i M ATT'CElk JF FAC,,,'T By STEWART ALSOPI sm 'I WASHINGTON-It may seem like cruel and unusual punishment to keep drag- ging into discussions of domestic politics the name of a man who is doing a supreme- ly important and wholly non-political job. 'Yet it has become downright impossible to write about American politics without using the name of Geneial of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. For the very powerful forces within the Republican party which oppose Sen. Robert A. Taft are now to all intents and purposes wholly united behind Eisen- hower. What is more, the broad outlines of the strategy for drafting Eisenhower are al- ready pretty well established. The key figure in the draft-Eisenhower movement is likely to be Sen. James Duff of Pennsylvania rather than Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Dewey is of course publicly on record for Eisenhower. Yet Dewey is not personally close to Eisen- hower; Dewey has inevitably made in- numerable enemies in the national Re- publican party; and these enemies equally inevitably suspect him, however unjustly, of using Eisenhower as a stalking horse. Duff suffers from none of these disabilities. Duff is approaching seventy, and he has no Presidential ambitions. An internation- ally minded, liberal Republican, he is close to Eisenhower, both personally and in his Sidewalk Supervisors SPRING CAN BE an excuse for many ideas, and one which I'll admit needs a defin- ite excuse of some sort is a better set-up for the campus sidewalk superintendents. More and more students with spring fever are foresaking the sunny front steps of An- gell Hall and the general library for a bet- ter view of the literary college addition, and there's not a single good vantage place which will handle the crowd. The staircases in Angell which overlook the job are becoming so crowded they interfere with between class crowds. Several would-be construction supervisors have complained of this, and it's time the University or the construction firm did something. A set of bleachers or a few park benches from the Plant Department would fix things up fine. As a further aid to the enjoyment of students interested in the growth of the University, it would be a great help if the different types of woxkers would wear dif- ferent colored shirts. This way the onlook- ers and tax-payers could see just which men did what. With a scorecard or pro- gram students could tell the head engi- neer from the waterboy. A suggestion box for engineering students and others who feel obliged to lend their aid to the construction of the addition would also be helpful for the growing number of watchers. -Harry Reed On Wit ON THE WHOLE, a witty person is rarely a good talker. The wit is a gate-crash- er, who sits at the edge of a conversation and throws small bombs at it until he blows it to blazes. You've got -to start talking about something else altogether when a wit has passed, for that conversation is dead- murdered by him. The real talker is witty in lightning like tangents from his matter; but the wit has only a tangent; he has nothing whatever to say on any subject. -James Stephens political thinking. He has made few ene- mies nationally. Since his crushing defeat of the Grundy forces, he will control Penn- sylvania's key delegation at the convention. Finally, he is all-out for Eisenhower's nom- ination. T HUS HE IS a sort of political loadstone, and the anti-Taft and pro-Eisenhower forces are already coalescing around him, in an informal alliance. The immediate ob- ject of this alliance is to perform a sort of holding operation - to prevent the Taft forces from capturing the nomination in advance during the coming year.,. The great anti-Taft redoubts,'the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California (which Gov. Earl Warren will hold against Taft) are counted on chiefly for this purpose. With these states, and others on the East and West coast acting as anti- Taft makeweights, the next twelve months will be devoted to quiet fence-building for Eisenhower. Then, according to the dream of the Eisenhower men, Eisenhower will return next Spring, his great mission of organizing the defense of Europe achieved. An Eisen- hower boom, with Duff its chief spokesman and organizer, will get under way. His name will be filed in Republican primaries in such states as Nebraska and Wisconsin, where consent of the candidate is not re- quired. The magic of the name will be con- clusively demonstrated. The Taft forces will be beaten back. Eisenhower will be nom- inated triumphantly. So much for the dream. Measured against reality, it contains one obvious possible flaw. The Eisenhower men profess absolute confidence that he will consent to run. But this is essentially because no politician wants to commit himself to a Presidential candi- date who may not be a candidate at all. When pressed, the Eisenhower supporters admit that Eisenhower has never given any- thing like a firm commitment to anyone. And Eisenhower is certainly quite genuine- ly doubtful about the wisdom of a soldier becoming involved in politics. In the end, Eisenhower's decision is very likely to de- pend to a great extent on none other than Sen. Robert A. Taft. ** * * FOR ONE THING, Sen. Taft, after some hesitations, now appears firmly to have embraced substantially the "Chicago Trib- une" version of foreign policy, which is of course dramatically opposed to everything Eisenhower stands for. For another thing, there are plenty of signs, as the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" reported in a recent series of well-documented articles, that Taft has entered into what the Post-Dispatch calls "a sinister alliance" with Sen. Joseph Mc- Carthy. It may' seem incredible that a man of Taft's great reputation for high integrity could ally himself with a McCarthy. Leav-' ing aside such matters as the Wisconsin income tax and the $10,000 fee from Lus- tron, McCarthy's ideas of personal probity are illustrated by the fact that, according to an incomplete tabulation by the "Post- Dispatch," he has spewed forth a total of seventy distortions and demonstrable false- hoods on matters affecting the national in- terest in a short twelve months. Yet, incredible or not, astute observers believe that an informal but solid Taft- McCarthy alliance is in the making. McCarthy is expected to start the spewing process soon again, this time from his strategic position on the Appropriations subcommittee, to which he was appointed with Taft's acquiescence. And the Taft camp in turn relies on McCarthy's "reve- lations" to fuel the Taft boom. Eisenhower is now the only man who can beat Taft for the nomination, and he must know it. He must also know what the results are likely to be if a major American ON THE Washington Merry-Go-Round with DREW PEARSON (Ed. Note: Drew Pearson is on a flying tour of Europe and the Middle East, surveying the world situation.) PEC, YUGOSLAVIA-For most of one day I have driven along what is sometimes called "the little iron curtain"-the border where Yugoslavia and Albania meet, for Yugoslavia enjoys the unenviable distinction of being squeezed between two sections of the iron curtain with Bulgaria and Hungary on one side and Albania on the other. How tiny, primitive Albania-dhiefly a Mohammedan country- happened to fall for Russian Communism has always been a myster to me. I lived on the Albanian border for two years after the first world war, once crossed it on horseback, and its people at that time were rugged individualists who hated all governments, including their own, with the passion of Pennsylvania's high-tariff Joe Grundy. Perhaps the explanation is that Albania is a nation of extreme poverty where the people have nothing to lose by trying new experiments plus the fact that any nation torn by a never-ending series of wars is an easy mark for Communism. At any rate, the border between Russianized Albania and anti-Russian Yugoslavia now is studded with armed guards, and strangers are not permitted within 20 kilometers (about 12 miles).l I managed to remember enough of the local language to talk my way past the first guard in the restricted zone and thereafter man- aged to talk my way past guards who stopped our jeep every half hour until we had passed through the old Turkish Albanian city of Prizerend, the border town of Jakovitza, and Deceny Monastery- one of the oldest in Serbia. But it now bristles with armament. The iron curtain here is not of barbed wire as it is around most satellite countries but consists of a steep mountain range, its base studded with troops. M Y PURPOSE -in visiting this isolated, desolate part of the Balkans was partly sentimental, partly to see whether the United States is getting credit for its good program, partly to gauge Yugoslav senti- ment toward Russia and the United States in an area far from the official blarney handed out by the diplomats in Belgrade. Regarding the food program, the United States has given the Yugoslav government $60,000,000 worth of flour with the understand- ing that they sell it through their regular ration system but making it clear that the flour comes from us. Its distribution was organized under Richard Allen of Carmel, Calif., a former Hoover food man who has also arranged for American inspectors to travel through the coun- try. I traveled part of the time with one bf these inspectors-efficient George Trett-as he interviewed local officials and local farmers and it appears the United States is getting credit. Regarding Yugoslav feeling toward Russia, it seems similar to that of the bride who has been jilted at the church and then watched her fiance marry another woman. Yugoslav papers are filled with bitter denunciations of Russia, reminding the people that anyone who deals with Russia always gets double-crossed and even playing up the Russian double-cross history back to 1700 as if it were hot first-page news today. Later, I heard Marshal Pijade, considered the father of Yugo- slav Communism, address 50,000 people in one of the bitterest attacks I have ever heard against Russia. Pijade was jailed for 14 years by King Alexander, at which time he taught Marxism to other Yugoslav leaders but now Moscow calls him "the hideous hunchback of Bel- grade." When I heard him he quoted Thomas Dewey, Walter Lipp- mann and Ernest Bevin as proof that Russia is a brutal nation and that the United States and England are vigorously supporting Yugo- slavia., i THIRTY YEARS AGO I had charge of 100 Bulgar prisoners in a diminutive Serbian village called Dobro Do, which means good valley-but the valley wasn't good, because it had been burned out by the Bulgarian army and my job was to rebuild the homes of Serbian widows, using Bulgarian prisoners for labor. We also had a transport company of 100 mules and 100 conscripted Albanian- mule drivers wh every night sat around campfires-the Albanians, the Bulgar prison- ers and their Serbian guards discussing war and what caused war. That was in 1919 and they recalled that in 1912 Serbia and Greece had fought Turkey, then in 1913 Bulgaria had fought Serbia and Greece, and in 1914 the world war started. Thus for six long years the Balkans were plunged in war-war which neither the Ser- bian guards nor their Bulgarian prisoners nor the Albanian con- scripts wanted. Their hope, they said, was Woodrow Wilson-he was going to proclaim a new world in which there would be eternal peace Well, the years have come and gone since then. Woodrow Wilson tried and failed,, and Dobro Do since then once again was ravished- this time by the Germans, later by the Italians-and then liberated by the Russians, who, at times,, acted more like conquerors than liberators This is the history of a typical Balkan village and when you look around at the poverty which always follows in the wake of war you understand why there is communism in the Balkans, for the people who are poor, who are bled white, who have nothing to lose, turn in their desperation to desperate remedies. This also may be a lesson for the United States for, if we get in volved in war, its aftermath may.find us nearer the communism which we are fighting so hard to avoid. (Copyright, 1951, by the Bell Syndicate, Inc.) NROTC Contracts.* 'a Gandhi-type persuasion, ad- To the Editor: justed to the so-called Christian 0UR- DEMOCRACY h a s for teaching. Mr. Laphamalso be- vvnearly tin years been in a lieves that following his princi- e ary Jus reen our ples alone will defeat Stalin! state of war. Just recently our It is earnestly recommended' President re-declared a national Itat members of his cult right now emergency. It would thereforebthtm bes S.cultrghnow appear fitting to clarify your rec- abe sentass vthresstan taskorce ord of the Lapham case. for peace May they succeed!I Your March 1st story was both would personally much rather fair and objective. But it did con- earn my living digging ditches in tamn two minor inaccuracies. First, our Federal TIreasury, not the Michigan than foxhles in Korea Navy, operatesaa conscience or Western Europe. W. B. McKean fund" for those citizens who have Colonel, U.S. MarineCorps evaded taxes, abused mailing pri- Professor of NavalSciene vileges, or otherwise escaped their P obligations. Second, I recommend- ed the expulsion of Mr. Lapham Glass Houses .. not as a "prerogative" of the To the Editor: NROTC regulations but in line of HE QUESTION in Mr. Lap- duty as a servant of our nation. ham's caseI one of morals. Your March 2nd editorial is To change one's mind is immoral harsh with the Engineering Col- Tocagon'midsimrl lege.s itr tha nynschoo when it involves the breaking of . I trust that anniversity would expel a stu- a contract, by definition of the de unvecommitted similar acts. University. How about raising the dent whoc evitemilys dormitory rates after the student May we review them briefly? Mr. Lapham, with his parents' has signed a contract for the ori- consent, executed five -separate ginal rate, and then declaring the contracts with the Secretary of room deposit forfeit if the student the Navy for and on behalf of the refuses to accept the (now more United States. Three were effec- expensive) accomodations? Ap- tive when he repudiated them. parently the University affirms His considerations in the first for itself the right to meet chang- were: full tuition, books, all equip- ing conditions, but denies it to its ment (less supplies), non-refund- students. Personally, I doubt that able fees, uniforms, transporta- Mr. Lapham is a coward . . . he tion, and $600 annual retainer most probably realizes that, whe- pay. In return he agreed to: en- ther he is enrolled in NROTC or ter upon and continue NROTC not, he will have to serve in the training until its completion; ac- armed forces. Further, his offer cept a commission, if offered; of repayment to NROTC is, to my serve as a regular or reserve offi- mind at least, a gesture of si- cer not less than six years; re- cerity. There's an old proverb main unmarried until commis- about not throwing stones if one sioned. lives in a glass house. In consideration for deferment -Arthur Freedman from call by selective service, he agreed in the second contract to Sserve on active duty for not less U than two years. His third contract, in consider- ation for enjoying the privileges of an American citizen, was a sol- emn oath of office: "to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all en- emies, foreign and domestic . to bear true faith and allegiance to the same . . . to well and faith- r fully perform the duties" of his t roffice. The significance of each con- t tract was carefully explained to Mr. Lapham. The first academic Sixty-First Year I year he spent five hours a week Edited and managed by students of I becoming familiar with the Navy. the University of Michigan under the Then he made a summer cruise in authority of the Board in Control of USS HELENA. There followed __Student__ublications. another academic year with five Editorial Staff hours a week of naval science, Jim Brown..........Managing Editor learning how to use the instru- Paul Brentinger.........City Editor ments of war. At the end of that Roma Lipsky~....... Editoria irector time he still might have resigned Dave Thomas..........eature Editor t Janet Watts...... .. ....Assclate Ei~tor Jwithout prejudice. Nancy Byan.......... Asocate Editor This is permitted because our ' James Gregory ....... .Associate lFditor Navy attempts to be realistic' Bill Connolly..,.......sports Editor about changing attitudes in young Bob Sandell.. .Associate Sports Editor men. On the other hand, NROTC Bill Brenton. ..Associate Sports Editor the the han, NOTCBarbara .ans........Wmen's Editor is not a philanthropic Federal Pat Brownson Associate Women's Editor scholarship. It is designed as an extension of the Naval Academy Business Staff to train career officers. How long Bob Daniels........Business Manager would the taxpayer tolerate allo- Water Shapero Assoc. Business Manager catin offunds to this program Paul Schaible... . Advertising Manager cation of Bob Mersereau...... Finance Manager were midshipmen permitted to re- Bob Miller........Circulation Manager sign upon graduation after receiv-' ing a fully-subsidized college edu- Telephone 23-24-1 cation? . Mr. Lapham refused in writing Member of The Associated Press "to participate in war or military The Associated Press Is exclusively preparedness of any sort." This entitled to the use for republication was complete, unilateral repudia- of all news dispatches creditea to it or otherwise credited to this newspaper. tion of his contracts. All rights of republication of all other Now, may we consider monetary matters herein are also reserved. - values? Never in its history has Entered at the Post office at Ann 1 the United States Navy permitted Arbor, Michigan as second-class mail "buyng ut" f a oblgaton nr "ater. "buying out" of an obligation nor Subscription during regular school hiring a substitute. Could any year: by carrier, $6.00; by mail, $7.00. 4%, BARNABY let me get this...Your imaginary Mr. O'Malley flew to Washington on his pink wings? Because some What's imaginary? The Supreme Court?J I Yes...That's what fieep telling Mr. O'Malley, my Fairy Godfather- j I I 1 i I /n n Ir I. i ii