THE MICHIGAN DAILY ""NIJ
[E MICHIGAN DAILY
Jal Publication of the Summer Session
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the awakening of the American public to its new
and revolutionary attitude toward mental hygiene.
Today, "insane asylums" are coming to be known
as "state hospitals"; "violent wards" have disap-
peared; mental hygiene clinics -several hundred
of them-have sprung up all over the country;
the courts and schools are turning more and more
to the psychiatrist for counsel; and insanity is re-
garded as a disease rather than as a crime.,
The National. Committee on Mental Hygiene,
founded, by Mr. Beers, is now at work on an inten-
sive program of prevention -seeking to strike at
the source of evil by going into the schools and
homes to deal with maladjustment in children. It
is a program that, alone, should be enough to an-
swer any charges of failure on the part of the
mental hygiene movement, and one that deserves
the energetic support of everypublic-spirited indi-
vidual.
Four stars - mustn't miss; three stars very good;
two stars - an average picture; one star - poor; no
star- don't go.
nents and, seeking their co-operation, it is also
possible that he realizes what a source of constant
domestic unrest and what a blot on Mexico's name
abroad the religious persecution has been. In any
genuine charter of liberties for the people, relig-
ious freedom must have a prominent place. It is
to be hoped that this will soon be restored in
Mexico.
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
A Washington
BYSTANDER"
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Publi~ed every morning except Monday during the
Univer ity year and Summer Session by the Board in
Control of Student Publications.
emef ithe Weste rConference Editorial Association
sand thie' g ten New ervice.
MEMBER
Asot ted ffigia fix
- 1934 (ii]|gg zs*-
MEMBER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Asocated Press is exclusively entitled to the use
for republication of all news dispatches credited to it or
not vt~ws rdtdi hs apradtelclnw
pblished hereite Alrghtisof republiatiohe lo aspecal
dispatche are reserved.
En~te at the 'Post Office at Ann Arbor, Michigan, as
second class matter. Special rate of postage granted by
Third Assistant Postmaster-General'
Subscription' during summer by carrier, $1.00; by mail,
$1.50. During regular school year by carrier, $4.00; by mall,
$4.50. -
Offices: Student Publications Building, Maynard Street,
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Representatives: National Advertising Service, Inc. 11
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EDITORIAL STAFF
Telephone AF49
MANAGING EDITOR...............JOHN C. IEA IEY
AS8I TAT MANAGING EDITOR ..ROBERT S. RUWITCH
ASSOCIATE EDITORS:, Thoms . Groehn, Thomas H.
Kleene, WilliamRedGuM.WppeJr
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Robert Cummins, Joseph Mattes,
Elsie Pierce, Charlotte Rueger.
RUSINESS .STAFF
BUSINES MANAGER ....RUSSELL READ
ASS At BS.MGR.....BERNARD ROSETHL2
6irclation Manage............E..Clinton B. Conger
BUSINESS ASSISTANTS: Charles L. Brush, Frederick E.
Maget.
Note On
Dc1mocraey. ..
.E~MOCRACPY is a. spiritual ideal, a
I2burning. passion, a moral hunger:.
It is .a. cherished hope which glows. and fades in.
mainls heart according to its realization. Yet, it
is asstimnulating. hope which encourages men to
seek ,a better, fuller, freer life.
The s iriV of demnocracy demands a social order
based.upon the vigorous, fearless co-ordination and
integration of all the dynamic forces of . nature
and human nature - whose power shall be har-
nassed not for the benefit of a single group, for a
minority, nor even for a majority, but for the
entire body politic.
The spirit of Democracy is the spirit of evolu-.
tion, Man's inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his
faith, in the future must. not be fettered by the
chains. of outworn habit, decadent custom, and
moss-backed institutions. His dynamic, evolving
powers must be free to analyze the institutions
which serve him. They must be free to take the
best from the past, the best that experience has
sanctioned, leaving what has withered and died,
to reorganize old institutions and create new ones
in the light of new facts and enlightened theory.
The belief that human nature is static, unmut-
able is death to the spirit of Democracy. Its very
strength depends upon man's willingness to sweep
into. oblivion those customs and. habits which ex-
perience has found warnting and which critical
minds have proved worthless.
Stagnation and reaction sap the vitality of De-
docracy. They stand for the old, decrepit social,
oi ders and "things as they were" instead of things
as they should be, Their presence epitomizes coer-
cion instead of cooperation and regimentation in-
stead of freedom - and freedom is the very es-
sence of Democracy. They are inseparable, they
go hand in hand, and they rise or fall together.
Mental
Hy~giene. .. -
WITH OUR INSTITUTIONS for the
mentally afflicted crowded to over-
flowing and our waiting lists swelling; with our
prisons filled with prisoners; and with mental mis-
Aits walking the sreets of virtually every large city
and tiny hamlet in the land, it might not seem un-
just to charge the mental hygiene movement with
failure to appreciably alleviate.the very critical sit-
uation with which it has attencpted to cope. But
a glance at the historyr of the moyement is enough
to suggest'that there is more reason to applaud
than to belittle. -
In the 18th century, said an official of the British
National Council for Mental Hygiene, "nearly the
whole of the indigent mentally afflicted were at
larg, living by such few wits as they possessed from
birth or were left to them after some acute attack,
and subjeced to the jeers, jibes, rough humor and
sport - even the violence and brutality of the
public; or if considered dangerous, they were con-
fined by a magistrate's order.. . in jails, houses of
correction, poorhouses, and houses of industry
where they were in an infinitely worse plight than
when at large." In the fact that we have today a
large number of institutions specifically intended
for. the mentally ill there is, then, a point in favor
of the mental hygiene movement.
A.Frenchrrap, Philippe Pinel, started the activity.
toward institutionalization of the unfit in 1792
when, for the first time in medical history, he at-
tempted to treat the insane as human beings and
put them into hospitals under lenient physicians.
Fifty years later, Dorothea Dix began her splendid
work of awakening the American public's interest
in the "new evangel" - work that was instrumental
in the foundation of no less than 32 mental insti-
tutions. Modern psychiatry was born at the end
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AT THE MAJESTIC
"BREAK OF HEARTS"
An RKO-Radio picture starring Katherine Hep-
burn and Charles oyer with Jean Hersholt and
John Beal. Also a Charley Chase Comedy, a Pete
Smith oddity, and a Hearst newsreel.
Un-beautiful (always), handsome (at odd mo-
ments), fierce-looking (often) Katie Hepburn
struggles through a story in which there is nothing
new, even nothing clever.
A young musician (Hepburn) meets quite by
chance New York's most famous conductor, Franz
Roberti (Charles Boyer), and marries him after a
brief acquaintance. But he goes out with other
women and she leaves him; he turns to drink ...
and so on.
Hepburn apparently has the ability to do very
good or very bad acting, depending on God knows
what. Her performance reflects this. She inter-
sperses convincing moments with the most hor-
rible of grimaces and melodramatic poses. But
good or bad, she couldn't have made "Break of
Hearts" very interesting anyway.
Charles Boyer, in a typical role and performance,
is good. He does a better job than Hepburn, but
still has to prove his versatility. Jean Hersholt, a
veteran, is fine, as usual. John Beal, one of the
screen's newer juveniles, is engaging.
Your interest in "Break of Hearts" will vary di-
rectly with your interest in the actors.
The short subjects are disappointing. In the
face of steadily declining quality of Hollywood
shorts (excepting cartoons, which are beginning
to monopolize the field) Charley Chase comedies
and Pete Smith oddities are holding the fort.
Unfortunately, "Poker at Eight" (Charley
Chase) and "Sporting Nuts" (Pete Smith) are
about the worst efforts of both. The Hearst
newsreel is no better than average. -R.A.C.
ArsOther S ee
850 Words
WILL BASIC ENGLISH, by means of which C. K.
°Ogden of Cambridge has reduced the essential
words of the language to the meager number of
850, ultimately become the conventional method of
international communication?
This possibility looms distinctly brighter as the
result of recent developments, for basic English
seems to be making great headway. A Japanese-
Basic English dictionary has just been completed;
basic English is furnishing a model for basic Chi-
nese; the Soviet Government is issuing basic Eng-
lish textbooks; and in the Leeward Islands basic
English is being taught in the schools,
Sooner or later, it is expected that basic English
will be adopted by the screen, which, of course, is
particularly anxious to use a language that can be
universally comprehended. It may be thought
that 850 words is a vocabulary incapable of narrat-
ing a whole drama, but this is not so. Not long
ago. a book of 80,000 words was written in basic
English without anyone's noticing any difference
from an ordinary book.
Nevertheless, some people have misgivings. If
basic English achieves the international currency
hoped for it, and especially if it is adopted by the
films, will it tend to restrict.the vocabulary of the
English-speaking peoples themselves, causing the
850 words, which it contains to be the only ones
out of the 400,000 in the dictionaries to be em-
ployed in practical daily use? How severe a re-
striction of present vocabularies this would repre-
sent may be gauged from the estimate that today
a British teashop waitress uses about 7,000 different
words.
But on the whole it is likely that these fears are
groundless. Basic English is not in any sense
"pidgin" English. It makes its users carefully
examine the exact shade of meaning of each of the
terms they employ; and this is the first step
toward good English. Moreover, the 850 words of-
basic English are only a foundation; the super-
structure of a larger vocabulary can easily be built
upon them. If basic English fulfills its interna-
tional functions properly, its national effects are
not likely to be undesirable.
-Christian Science Monitor.
Straws In The Mexican Wind
THERE ARE :INDICATIONS in Mexico that the
religious war that has disgraced the country in
recent months is to be ended, or drastically cur-
tailed. First was the reorganization of the cabinet,\
when President Cardenas and Gen. Calles parted
political company, of which one result was elim-
ination of men who had pushed the war on the
Catholic church and substitution of officials of
By KIRKE SIMPSON
WASHINGTON - Fears of congressional leaders
- and presumably of business - that the
wealth tax program means a session of Congress
prolonged into September or later, are challenged
by the records. Congress has sat all summer a
number of times, even in days before air-condition-,
ing devices tempered the summer heat in Wash-
ington somewhat for the law-makers. It has taken
very special emergencies, however, to, induce long
summer sessions. War, rumors of war, the after-
math of war and the tariff, have provided the in-
ducements most frequently when Congress dipped
beyond mid-July for adjournment.
This session is not comparable to predecessors
because it started later. The Norris anti-lame duck
constitutional amendment saw to that. The usual
"long" session began in December. It starts a
month later now-a-days.
* * * *
MIGHT SIT ALL. SUMVER
THERE isn't much doubt that if a general revision
of the tariff had been thrust upon Congress
at the eleventh hour so far as norm'al mid-July
adjournment is concerned, it might sit not only all
summer, but all fall. Pr'esident Hoover, during his
first year in office, discovered for himself what a
tariff session means.
He called a special session for "limited" tariff
revision soon after he took office. Congress met on
April 15 and adjourned on November 22 to meet
again in regular session on December 2. Just what
part that particular session played in shaping
American political history and paving the way for
the Roosevelt New Deal still is a matter of heated
debate.
Will shaping a new tax policy as proposed by
President Roosevelt result in any such prolonga-
tion of the present session? If it is confined strictly
to the .limited wealth-tax increase categories out-
lined by the President, probably not. But if de-
velopments follow the Vandenberg formula and the
effort is to redraft all tax schedules on a budget
balancing basis, nobody could say how long it might
take. That is a point to be considered in esti-
mating the possibilities of the Vandenberg plan.
* * * *
BID FOR NOMINATION?
1NCIDENTALLY, the Vandenberg tax program
looked to many political writers like the most
definite bid for the Republican 1936 nomination
he has made. When, twitted in, the Senate, as he
so frequently is both by Democrats and, now and
then, by his Michigan colleague, Couzens, with such
ambitions, Vandenberg has managed to smile his
way out in non-committal fashion. His counter
to the presidential tax proposals was calculated to
invite the construction that he saw in it a possible
prime issue to bridge the gap between Republican
eastern conservatives and western progressives.
Apparently the senator regarded his announce-
ment as of more importance than any run-of-the-
mill declaration of policy on other New Deal ideas
he has thus far made. Copies were sent around to
newspaper offices.
By JOHN SELBY
"REDDER THAN THE ROSE,"
By Robert Forsythe; (Covici-Friede).
TWO IMPORTANT matters "condition," as the
psychologists would certainly say, the reader's
response to Robert Forsythe's "Redder Than the
Rose."'
One is the "take-off" on the title of Stark
Young's famous book. One might expect a satire
on Mr. Young's book, a satire on magnolia-scented
novels, a satire on lush writing generally. But the
red refers to Mr. Forsythe's political complexion.
The second is that complexion. One must realize
that Mr. Forsythe is quite as intolerant of conserv-
atives and liberals as those gentry are intolerant
of Reds. There is but one solution for present
problems in Mr., Forsythe's mind., This is com-
munism and this is infallibly right. His abundant
and slashing humor fails him only here. He can
see how funny everything is, himself included, but
he cannot see that there might possibly be some-
thing amusing in his politics. This (to crib a
phrase from the Britishers Mr. Forsythe hates with
a whirling hatred) is just too, too bad.
For Mr. Forsythe has satire, irony, sarcasm,
humor and innuendo perfectly at his command.
He can make a subject so ridiculous that even
when his facts are shaky his reader is sympathetic
and probably converted. He applies his talents
to a most varied list of subjects. One of the 38
little essays in "Redder Than the Rose" snatches
a bloody scalp from Ernest Hemingway's head:
"What we do get from Mr. Hemingway," he writes,
"is the impression of a man who has been writing
in a vacuum and is now ending in a vacuum."
Another is a hilarious and yet stinging fireside
scene in the White House. Another takes Alex-
ander ("these old bones") Woollcott for a ride. Mr.
Hearst, the state of Indiana, the British royal fam-
ily, the Duke-Cromwell alliance, the Mellons -
these and many others are birched.
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