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the louisville cardinal
volume xli, number 7 university af louisville, louisville, kentucky 40208 october 17, 1969
UL students, faculty push for peace
By CAROLYN YETI'ER
Cardinal Staff Writet·
Wearing a black armband he had worn
26 years ago on funeral duty during
World War II, President Woodrow M.
Strickler accepted on behalf of UL "the
tree of hope, peace, and memorial to the
dead" from the Moratorium Committee
Wednesday afternoon.
In his remarks to the 500 participants
gathered near the flag poles behind Gardi­ner
Hall, Strickler stated that the uni­versity
should be a place in which a free
exchange of ideas can take place. Then
while the crowd applauded, he broke the
ground for the planting of the symbolic
tree.
The president's participation was the
highlight of an afternoon of proceedings
planned by the UL Moratorium Committee
to protest the government's military in­volvement
in Vietnam.
Not treason
-Photo by Philip S. Cathcart
The afternoon program of singing,
speaking and marching began at 12:45 p.m.
on the library slope in front of the UC
building. It followed the Student Activi­ties
Board's convocation and discussion
session in Bigelow Hall. A student folk
group led songs as the crowd gathered on
the lawn.
A line of reaction that stretches around the Quadrangle
Steve Blumberg of the SAB presented
the first speaker, Ed Kagin, a law student,
who related various facts relevant to the
Vietnam war issue, including a short
history of U.S. involvement.
Following Kagin, the Reverend F. G.
Sampson spoke on the black involvement
in the war. "The name of the game is not
skin, but sin."
He said, "America is busy putting out
the fire across the river when her own
house is on fire.
"I am not a man of treason, but a man
of love. I love my country." The audience
cheered.
"If we can see the Sea of Tranquility,
no one can say we can't have peace on
earth." As he finished by quoting Tenny­son's
Ulysses, the crowd gave him a stand­ing
ovation.
Other speakers included a two-year
Vietnam veteran, Unitarian minister Rev.
Weston, and a supporter for the Mul­draugh
coffeehouse near Fort Knox.
The silent march began at 2:15p.m., with
the monitors guiding the estimated 500
marchers around the Quadrangle to the
memorial site behind Gardiner Hall. As
the marchers gathered in a circle, Blum­berg
spoke of the symbolism of the caged
pigeons and presented the tree to Presi­dent
Strickler.
U.S. position in Vietnam
debated by professors
By SARA WALTER
Cardinal Staff Writer
The humanist Erasmus wrote four and
half centuries ago: "War is so savage a
thing that it rather benefits beasts than
men ... so pestilent that it corrupts men's
manners, so injust that it is best executed
by the worst of men. . . ." It is almost con­tradictory-
and it is indeed ambitious­to
attempt to reason in reference to so
irrational and "savage" a scourge as war.
Yet Moratorium Day at UL witnessed just
such a rare moment.
Dr. Laurence Howe of the UL history
department and Dr. William Berman of
University of Toronto, formerly of UL,
confronted one another in a "ietnam de­bate
that inaugurated an entire afternoon
of provocative oratory.
Opening the discussion, Howe said,
"This debate really had no right to occur
since it would inevitably debilitate our
military effort and demean our position
before the enemy. Indeed, this was the
purpose of the nationwide organization of
the moratorium by American 'fellow trav­ellers'
of the Viet Cong."
Moral side
Claiming that we had almost won the
war several times before scruples over­came
the effort necessary for one final
thrust, Howe then defended the morality
of the American presence in Vietnam. ~
to the moral side of the matter, there
was no question, he said. "Any great pow­er
reserves the right to give assistance
to any friend to resist an enemy."
Howe implied a complicity between
"those who would destroy us" and the
protestors for peace. After deploring the
irrevocable series of steps that engulfed
us in Vietnam, Howe asserted that the
American government must deal with its
inheritance from its predecessors in a
worthy manner. "We're stuck with some
things," he concluded, "And since we seem
to be. stuck with the dubious patrimony
of Vietnam, we must proceed to defend
that commitment."
Berman stood counter to Howe's posi­tion
from the outset. Instead of seeing
the moratorium as a source of comfort
to the enemy, Berman viewed it as a
success already if only as proof of an
awakening national consciousness.
Repeated statement
He then re-read a statement he had
made in Bigelow Hall in 1965.
Paraphrasing Erasmus, the statement
condemned the Vietnam war as "irration­al,
dangerous, and full of folly." Such pax
americana, he punned, is recognized now
as pox americana.
Berman proceeded to summarize in
brief the recent history of the progressive
deterioration of the social and political
structure of Vietnam. Saying that the
United States failed to force elections in
South Vietnam due to a well-founded fear
that Ho Chi Minh would win, Berman
claimed that American commitment to
self -determination in Southeast Asia was
but a farce bordering on criminal decep­tion.
During the tree ceremony, each mem­ber
of the UL Moratorium Committee
scooped a shovel of dirt from the hole. The
marchers then silently returned to the li­brary
slope.
Dr. William Berman, former UL faculty
member, stated that he had left an entire­ly
different campus a year and a half
ago.
"I'm proud of America the way it is
today. I come here not to burn the
American flag, but in the words of Nor­man
Thomas, 'to wash it'," he said.
Participants wore black armbands
distributed by the committee and car­ried
American flags. There were multi­colored
posters stating, "Give blood here,
not in Vietnam," and, "No more Koreas."
Several students displayed "Stop Nixon"
buttons, and a few had sewn flags onto
their jackets upside-down.
One student wore an upside-down Mc­Carthy
campaign button on his lapel. He
explained, "McCarthy has said that the
peace movement is upside down, with too
much violence." The student added, "But
it's righting itself, and the UL moratori­um
is a symbol of it. Straight people and
hip people are working here together this
afternoon."
A banner stretched along the hedge
read "We are determined to carry on the
resistance until complete U.S. with­drawal."
Security police were present with their
walkie-talkies, but at no point interferred.
Steve Blumberg closed the afternoon
activities at 3:30 by saying that it was not
the end, but the beginning of peace ac­tions.
-Photo by John Beckman
Dr. William Berman: pro U.S. withdrawal
Berman's basic theme was the Amer­ican
drive and its awesome price. "Today
South Vietnam is an American satrapy"
with the necessary result that "America
has at last found her Algeria." He cited
some of the banes derived of this Algeria
as the social degeneration and devastation
of South Vietnam, the "waste and squan­der"
of our own human and natural re­sources,
the assault on civil liberties and
the right to dissent, rampant inflation, and
increased likelihood of a nuclear con­frontation
with Communist China-all be­cause
of "a stupid war waged by men who
have no sense of history and no human­ity."
In addition to the empire theme, Ber­man
laid heavy blame for the war on the
economic maintenance of the military-in­dustrial
complex. "The Great Society aims
of bettering the lot of the poor will be
prostrated by this 'machine' that provides
'busy work for stone-age military types.' "
Aside from the tremendous physical cost
of the war, Berman concluded by citing
even more subtle yet perhaps more dur­able
effects of our "Algeria": "America
because of this war will never be the
same. She has lost her metaphysical inno­cence,
an inmate belief in her superiority
sustained by a pressing consciousness of
that innocence-until Vietnam. Along with
her dead, America will count her sins. It
may not be so easy to assess the ramifica­tions
of such a legacy of a guilt-ridden na­tional
consciousness."