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3
DALLAS, PENNSYLVANIA
THE DALLAS POST, THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, 1962
SECTION B—PAGE 1
“Western Editor Analyzes Our Manners And Morals
By JENKIN LLOYD JONES
Editor, Tulsa Tribune
This ladies and gentleman, is to
be a jeremiad. |
I am about to inflict upon you
an unrelieved, copper bottomed, six-
ply, all-wool, 25-minute howl of
calamity about the present moral
am
going to talk about our responsibil-
ities therefore as the temporary cus-
todians of America’s press.
You may dismiss such fogyism
with a tolerant laugh. But the path-
way of history is littered with the
bones of dead states and fallen em-
pires. Most of them rotted out be-
fore they were overwhelmed. And
they were mot, in most cases,
promptly replaced by something
better.
Nearly 1,000 years between the
fall of Western Rome and the rise
of the Renaissance, and in between
we had the Dark Ages in which
nearly all of man’s institutions were
inferior to those which had gone
before. 1 don’t want my children’s
children to pass through a couple of
centuries of dialectic materialism
before the sun comes up again.
It is sad to watch the begin-
ning of decay. It was sad to see an
age of Pericles replaced by the
drunken riots of Alcibiades There
was, indeed, just cause for gloom
when the Roman mobs, flabby with
free bread and bemused by free cir-
cuses, cheered for the unspeakable
Nero and the crazy Caligula.
Beginning of Decay
Alaric’s Goths finally flowed over
the walls of Rome. But it was not
that the walls were low. It was that
Rome, itself, was low. The sensual
life of Pompeii, the orgies on Lake
Trasimene, the gradually weakening
fibre of a once self-disciplined people
—all these brought Rome down. She
went down too early. She had much
to teach the world.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, IT
look upon our own country and
much that I see disturbs me. But
we are a great people. We have
a noble tradition. We have much
to teach the world, and if America
should go down soon it would be
too early.
One thing is certain. We shall
be given .no centuries for a lei-
surely and comfortable decay. We
have an enemy now— remorseless,
crude, brutal and cocky. However
much the leaders of the Communist
conspiracy may lie to thejr subjects
about. our motives, about our con-
ditions of property, our polices and
aims, one thing they believe them-
selves implicitly—and that is that
we are ‘in an advanced state of
moral decline,
It is a dogma of current Com-
munist faith that America is Sodom
and Gomorrah| ready for the kill
Communists’ Puritanism
Do you know what scares me
about the Communists? ==
It's not their political system,
which is primitive and savage. It’s
not their economic system which
works so badly that progress in a
few directions is purchased at the
price of progress in all the rest.
It is their puritanism.
. It does no good to comfort our-
selves with the reflection that these
are the products of endless brain-
washings, of incessant propaganda,
contrary rehment The confidence
that they are morally superior is
there.
You can’t get very far into
Russia before the naive questions
of your Intourist guide reveal that
she thinks she is talking to a soft
fop who is ripe for the tumbril and
the guillotine. In the schoolyard
the childen rush up to show you,
not their yo-yos, but their scholar-
ship medals. And when you offer
them mew Lincoln pennies as sou-
venirs they rip off their little
Young Pioneer buttons and hand
them to you, proud that they are
not taking gifts, but are making a
fair exchange.
The Russian state is as austere
as the Victorian state. Russian
literature may be corny, but it’s
clean, and it glorifies the Russian
people and exudes optimism and
promise. Russian art is stiffly repre-
sentational, but the paintings and
the sculpture strive to depict beauty
and heroism — Russian beauty, of
course, and Russian heroism.
‘Progressive Education’
And what of us?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, let's
take them one at a time:
We are now at the end of the
third decade of the national insan-
ity known as ‘progressive edu-
cation.” This is the education where
everybody passes, where the report
cards are non-committal lest the
failure be faced with the fact of
his failure, where all move at a snail
pace like a trans-Atlantic convoy
so that the slowest need not be
left behind, and all proceed toward
adulthood in the lockstep of ‘‘to-
getherness.”
With what results? At an age
when European kids are studying
the human capillary system and
discussing the binomial theorem our
youngsters are raising pollywogs on
the classroom windowsill and pre-
tending to keep store. This is what
is known as ‘learning by doing.”
We have produced tens of thousands
of high school graduates who move
their lips as they read and cannot
write a coherent paragraph. While
our Russian contemporaries, who
were supposed to be dedicated to
the mass man, have beet busy
constructing an elite we have been
engaged in the wholesale production
of mediocrity. What a switch!
Hard work and Integrity
I wish ‘you could have read all
the letters I have received, in the
past few months from disgusted
teachers who have tried to reintro-
duce principles of hard work and in-
tegrity in their classrooms over the
opposition of the school hierarchies.
It is high time that these Ph..D.
pooh-bahs of John Deweyism stepped
forward and permitted themselves
to be graded. But no.
You recall that last fall the school
board of the little township of Twin
Lakes, Wisconsin, dissatisfied with
modern primers, announced that it
was introducing reprints of 80-year-
old McGuffey Readers. Maybe it was
making a bad mistake Maybe the
new books and new teaching meth-
ods are far superior. Here was a
fine chance to find out.
But did the Wisconsin [State
Board of Education. offer a sporting
challenge—a one-year test for ex-
ample to see which was the better
merely moved to deprive Twin
Lakes of state aid to the thunder-
ous applause, I'm sorry to say, of
the so-called “liberals.”
When was the last time you, as
editors examined the curricula of
your local schools? Are your stu-
dents given the standardized Iowa
and ‘Stanford tests, and if so, how
did your schools rank compared to
the national average? Do your kids
bring home meaningful report cards,
or are parents just getting a lot of
gobbledegook about adjustments
and attitudes? When was the last
time you asked to look at any sen-
ior English themes? When have
you given a fine picture spread to
your town’s best scholars?
Non-Objective Paintings
Having generally meglected disci-
plines in education it was quite
logical that we Americans should
neglect disciplines in art. The great
“painters and sculptors of the past
studied anatomy so diligently that
many of them snatched bodies. And
today, after many centuries, we
stare at the Sistine Chapel or at the
walls of the Reichsmusee and mar-
vel at their works.
But this self-discipline is of little
concern to the modern non-objec-
tive painter. All he needs is pig-
ment and press agent. He can
stick bits of glass, old rags and
quids of used chewing tobacco on a
board and he is a social critic. He
can drive a car back and forth in
pools of paint and Life magazine
will write him up.
Talent is for squares. What you
need is vast effrontery. This is
the kind of art that a painter with
na ability can paint, and a teacher
with no ability can teach. No won-
der it's popular at the factory end.
But the tiny minority of youngsters
who might have the spark of a
Titian or a Rembrandt within them
stay unencouraged and wunrecog-
nized. And our museums are filled
with splashes, cubes and blots be-
ing stared at by confused citizens
who haven't the guts to admit they
are confused.
Collapse of Morality
But fakery in art is alight cross
we bear. Much more serious is our
collapse of moral standards and the
blunting of our capacity for right-
eous indignation.
Our Puritan ancestors were pre-
occupied with sin. They were too
preoccupied with it. They were hag-
ridden and guilt-ridden and theirs
was a repressed and neurotic so-
ciety. But they had horsepower.
They wrested livings from the
irocky land, built our earliest col-
leges, started our literature, caused
our industrial revolution, and found
time in between to fight the Indians,
the! French and the British, to bawl
for abolition, woman suffrage and
prison reform, and to experiment
with graham crackers and bloomers.
They were a tremendous people.
And for all their exaggerated .at-
tention to sin, their philosophy
rested on a great granite rock. Man
was the master of his soul. You
didn’t have to be bad. = You could
and should be better.
wanted to escape the eternal fires,
you'd damned well better be.
Sin Is Bemusing
In .recent years all this has
changed in America.. We have de-
of deprivation by censorship and |approach, ‘theirs or McGuffey’s? | cided that sin is largely imaginary.
jamming of counter-information and | Not a bit of it. The State Board | We are bemused with behaviorist
—— N—
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ALL
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/
tend to make him evil.
And if you | : 3 :
i y | irresponsible behavior is
psychology which holds that ab-
stract things like insight, will and
spirit are figments of the imagin-
ation. Man, says the behaviorist, is
either a product of a happy com-
bination of genes and chromosomes
or an unhappy combination. He
moves in an environment that will
tend to make him good or that will
He is just
a chip tossed helplessly by forces
beyond his control, and therefore
not responsible/
Well, the theory that misbehavior
can be cured by pulling down tene-
ments and erecting in their places
elaborate public housing is not
holding water. The crime rates con-
tinue to rise along with our outlays
for social services.
We are far gone in fancy eu-
phemy. There are no lazy bums
any more — only “deprived per-
sons.” It is impolite to speak of
thugs. They are “underprivileged.”
Yet the swaggering, duck-tailed
young men who boldly flaunt their
gang symbols on their motorcycle
jackets are far more blessed in
creature comforts, opportunities for
advancement, and freedom from
drudgery than 90 percent of the
world. We have sown the dragon’s
teeth of pseudo-scientific sentimen-
tality, and out of the ground has
sprung the legion bearing switch-
blade knives and bicycle chains.
Clearly something is missing.
Could it be the rest of the world’s
children have been given — the
doctrine of individual responsibility ?
Honorable Career on Relief
Relief is gradually becoming an
honorable career in ‘America. It is
a pretty fair life, if you have neither
conscience nor pride. An angry
old judge in Muskogee County Okla-
homa, upon his retirement last
month, asserted that in his last
docket 27 bastardy cases were filed
for no other purpose than to qualify
for the relief rolls, and that in most
cases both the plaintiff and the
defendant continued living together
while awaiting the next arrival. Any
effort to stop this racket brings an
immediate threat that federal aid
funds will be withdrawn.
The state will give a mother a
bonus for her illegitimate children,
and if she neglects them sufficiently
she can save enough out of the ADC
pavments to keep herself and her
boyfriends in wine and gin. Nothing
is your fault. And when the city
fathers of Newburgh suggested that
able-bodied . welfare clients might
sweep the streets the “liberal”
editorialists arise as one man and
denounce them for their medieval
cruelty.
I don’t know how long America
can stand this erosion of principle.
But if we wish to survive maybe we
had better do something about the
elaborate pretense that there is no
difference between the genuinely-
unfortunate and the mobs of re-
liefers who gather to throw bottles
every time the cops try to make
a legitimate arrest. The welfare
state that taxes away the rewards
for responsible behavior so that it
can remove the age-old penalties for
building
on a foundation of jelly.
Realism in Print
Finally, there is the status
our entertainment and our litera-
ture.
Can anyone deny that movies
are dirtier than ever? But they
don’t call it dirt. They call it
“realism.” Why do we let them fool |
us? Why do we nod owlishly when
they tell us that filth is merely a |
daring art form, that licentipusness |
Isn't it |
is really social comment?
plain that the financially-harassed
movie industry is putting gobs
sex in the darkened drive-ins in an
effort to lure curious teen-agers
away from their TV sets?
Three weeks ago Bill Diehl, the
righteously-angry entertainment edi-
tor of the St. Paul Dispatch, ran
down the list of present and coming
attractions, as follows:
Walk on the Wild Side. Set in a |
brothel.
A View From the Bridge. Incest.
The Mark. A strange young man |
trifles with little girlsd
The Children’s Hour. Two school
| teachers suspected of being Lesbians.
All Fall Down. A psychopathic
attacker of females.
Cape Fear. A crazy rapist.
Lolita. A middle-aged man's af-
fair with a 12-year-old.
The Chapman Report. The adven-
tures of a nymphomaniac.
They Apologize Too Much
In a speech a couple of months
ago in Hartford, Connecticut, Mr.
Eric Johnson, president of the
Motion Picture Association of Amer-
ica, asked the plaintive question:
“Why, despite our unceasing efforts,
does the film industry fail at times
to have public confidence 2”
Then he suggested an answer. The
movie people apologize too much, he
said. - They should take pride in the
fact that they have amended their
production code: (Mr. Johnston ap-
parently uses the term “amended”
when he means a general tooth ex-
traction.)
“What art form,” asked Mr. John-
ston, “has not had to keep up with
the times to reflect contemporary
society ?” ay
Well, hooray for Mr. Johnstons
contemporary society. Incestuous
Americans. Perverted Americans.
Degenerate Americans. Murderous
Americans.
How many of these contemporary
Americans do you know ?
Public Service Ads
But perhaps the most intriguing
part of Mr. Johnston's speech dealt
with newspaper movie ads. It is
of |
of |
ridiculous, he said, for parents to
complain about bad influence by
movies upon their children when
all parents have to do is look close-
ly at the ads.
“I have yet to run across a movie
ad so subtle,” said Mr. Johnston,
“that a concerned parent would not
know whether the film was suitable
for his child.” 1
Well, here is a semantical pole-
vault that ought to set a world’s
record, For the suggestive, half-
dressed figures locked in passionate
embrace that have been decorating
the theatre ads in our great moral
dailies are now revealed as a public
service, generously paid for by the
movie moguls so that parents can
be warned! 4
Last year our advertising man-
ager and I got so tired of Holly-
wood’s horizontal art that we de--
cided to throw out the worst and
set up some standards. We thought
that this belated ukase of ours might
cause some interruption in adver-
tising some shows. But no. Within
a couple of hours the exhibitors
were down with much milder ads.
How was this miracle accomplished ?
It seems that exhibitors are sup-
plied with several] different ads for
each movie. If the publishers are
dumb enough to accept the most
suggestive ones those are what
they get. But, if publishers squawk,
the cleaner ads are sent down.
Isn’t it time we all squawked?
I think it's time we gentlemen
of the press quit giving Page 1 play
to Liz and Eddie. 1 think it’s time
we asked our Broadway and Holly-
wood columnists if they can’t find
something decent and inspiring go-
ing on along their beats.
Bawdiness in Dinner Jacket
And the stage: Bawdiness has put
on a dinner jacket. The old bur-
lesque skits, that you used to be
able to see at the Old Howard and
the Gayety for six bits are now on
display in the most lavish Broadway
revues at $8.80 a seat.
But perhaps we should be glad
to settle for good old heterosexual
dirt. The April issue of Show
Business, Illustrated, quotes Dr. L.
John Adkins, a New York psycho-
therapist, as saying that in his opin-
ion at least 25 percent of the per-
sons presently connected with the
American theatre are confirmed
homosexuals.
Even the normally gstrong-stom-
ached drama critics are beginning
to get mad. |
Howard Taubman, in a lead arti-
cle in the drama section of the
New York Times, recently wrote as
follows:
“It is time to speak openly and
candidly of the increasing incidence
of homosexualty on the New York
stage. It is noticeable when a male
designer dresses the girls in a
musical to make them unappealing
and disrobes the boys so that more
male skin is visible than art or
illusion requires. It is apparent in
a vagrant bit of nasty dialog
thrown into, a show, or in a re-
dundant touch like two mannish
females walking across a stage
without a reason or a word of com-
ment.”
‘Cultural Exchange’
What do you know about the
“cultural exchange” program to
which we are all involuntary con-
tributorg ?
Last summer an American tour-
ing company, sponsored by the
State Department and paid for by
our tax dollars, presented one of
Tennessee Williams’ riper offerings
to an audience in Rio de Janeiro.
The audience hooted and walked
out. And where did # walk to?
Right across the street where a
Russian ballet company was putting
on a beautiful performance for the
glory of Russia! How stupid can we
get,
A couple of months ago in Phoe-
nix 1 attended a tryout of a new
play by William Inge. It takes
place in the Chicago apartment of
a never-married woman whose son
by a bellhop has just been released
from reform school, and whose cur-
rent boy friend is being seduced by
the nymphomaniac across the ‘hall
whose husband is a drunk. 1 won-
der if the State Department is con-
sidering putting this show on the
road around the world.
We are drowning our youngsters
in violence, cynicism and sadism
piped into the living room and even
the nursery. Every Saturday even-
ing in the Gunsmoke program Miss
Kitty presides over her combination
saloon ‘and dance hall. Even the
five-year-olds are (beginning to
wonder what's going on upstairs.
The grandchildren of the kids who
used to weep because The Little
Match Girl froze to death now feel
cheated if she isn’t slugged, raped
and thrown into a Bessemer con-
verter.
Now Comes ‘Eros’
‘And there’s our literature. I pre-
sume we all have our invitations
to become charter subscribers of
Eros, the new quarterly magazine
of erotica at $10 a copy. I got
three invitations, so either the |Ad-
dressograph was stuck or I'm con-
sidered a hot prospect.
Anyway, the publisher, Ralph
Ginzburg, says this, and I quote:
“Eros has been born as a result
of the recent series of court de-
cisions that have realistically inter-
preted America’s obscenity laws and
that have given to this country a
new breadth of freedom of expres-
sion.”
And what are the dimensions of
this ‘breadth of freedom”? Well,
we are assured that Eros’ first is-
sue will include an article on
aphrodisiacs, a schematic drawing
for a male chastity belt, a story
about an old New York bawdy
house where women copulated with
beasts, the latest word on Havana's
red light district, and the memoirs
of a stripper which, it says here, “is
astonishing for its matter-of-fact-
ness.”
Isn’t it splendid that Mr. Ginz-
burg stands with the frozen ghosts
of Valley Forge as a fearless de-
fender of his country’s freedom?
Ten dollars, please!
The Seine at Home
The fast buck boys have suc-
ceeded in convincing our bumfuz-
zled judges that there is no differ-
ence between a peep show and a
moral lecture. The old eye-pop-
pers which tourists used to smug-
gle back from Paris under their
dirty shirts are now clothed in
judicial] blessing. A ‘Chicago judge
has recently issued a blanket in-
junction against any one who might
try to prevent the sale of Tropic of
Cancer to children, Lady Chatter-
ly’s Lover and Ulysses are on the
paperback shelves right next to the
comic books. They can close the
bookstalls on the Seine. It’s all
over at your corner drugstore
where the kids hang out.
Don Maxwell of the Chicago Tri-
bune last year asked his book de-
partment to quit advertising scato-
logical literature by including it in
the list of best sellers. The critics
and the book publishers have de-
nounced him for tampering with
the facts. I would like to raise a
somewhat larger question:
The Soul of America
Who is tampering with the soul
of America?
| For nations do have souls. They
have collective personalities. Peo-
ple who think well of themselves
collectively exhibit elan and en-
thusiasm and morale. Where they
low-rate ‘themselves as individuals
they will not long remain the
citizens of great nations.
Dr. Celia Deschin, specialist in
medical sociology at Adelphi College,
in a recent article in This Week
magazine, says it’s time for a new
kind of Kinsey Report. She asserts
duced a report that was heavily
loaded by exhibitionists and that
| did immense damage to America
‘by peddling the impression that
sexual self-discipline neither exists
in this country nor is it desirable.
Generally, she says, those par-
ents who are afraid to lay down
the law have the most miserable
children. Childen, she points out,
want honest direction and and a set
of sensible rules to live by: Where
these are denied them on the fan-
tastic theory that its no longer
that the late Doctor Kinsey pro- !
scientific to say No, the kids often’
develop subconscious anxiety. Much
juvenile delinquency springs from
a deep hunger for rules, It is a
masochistic effort to seek punish-
ment.
chin, abhors a world where every-
thing goes.
Or, as my tough-minded old grand-
mother put it, “The youngster who
doesn’t know that there’s a Lord
in Israel bounces around in g lim-
bo where there is no force of gra-
ity. x you think he’s happy you’ re
crazy.”
Time to Get Mad
The time has come to dust off the
rule book. The game is unplayable
if you're allowed two strikes or six,
if you can use a bat or a cannon,
and if some days you can have
three men on third and other days
there isn’t any third base at all
We have to stop trying to make up
our own rules.
And that goes for all of us. It's
time to quit seeking learning with=
out effort and wages without work,
It’s time we got mad about payola.
We should ask the Lord's forgive-
ness for our inflated expense ac-
counts, and quit pretendéng that
goonery is a human right.
Ladies and gentlemen: do not
let me overdraw the picture, This
is still a great, powerful, vibrant,
able, optimistic nation. Americans
—our readers—do believe in them-
selves and in their country.
But there is rot, and there is
blight, and there is cutting out and
filling to be done i# we, as the
leaders of free men, are to survive
the hammer blows which quite
plainly are in store for us all.
Hit the Sawdust Trail
We have reached the stomach-
turning. point. We have reached
the point where we should re
examine the debilitating philosophy
of permissiveness.
confused with the philosophy of
liberty. The school system that per-
mits our children to develop a quar-
ter of their natural talents is not a
champion of our
healthy man who chooses to loaf on
unemployment compensation is not
a defender of human freedom. The
playwright who would degrade us,
the author who would profit from
pandering to the worst that’s in us,
are no friends of ours.
It's time we hit the sawdust trail.
It’s time we revived the idea that
there is such a thing as sin—just
plain old willful sin. It is time we
brought self-discipline back into
style. And who has a greater ree
sponsibility at this hour than we—
the gentlemen of the press.
* * *
So 1 suggest:
Let's look at our educational
institutions at the local level, and
(Continued from Page 2 B)
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