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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (April 22, 1962)
Why, ask the earnest inquirers after pat answers, do we have these dreadful holiday riots the spring-vacation troubles at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the riots in New England and California last Labor Day, the Newport Jazz Festival riots of recent years? Why do masses of college students, high school students, and other young people mas querading as students converge on holiday resorts? Why, once too many of them have crowded together, do they drink, fight, destroy property and, in short, riot? Is it a sign of social decadence? Are we wit nessing a breakdown in law and order? Are these stampedes, as one psychiatrist has Bug-' gested, evidence of youth's search for status? No simple answer suffices. Probably as long as university towns have existed, the conflict between Town and Gown, between the sober citizenry who have to work and the privileged youth who have "nothing to do but study," has intermittently broken into the open. At best, the responsible authorities of the uni versity and the community try to divert student shenanigans into more acceptable channels or they ruefully tolerate them; at worst, they com bat them, turning simple gaiety into rioting. In English-speaking countries, where all stu dents are treated as minors without rights, these high jinks usually are meaningless pranks. On the European continent, in Latin America, and in Asia, the conflict between students and authority more often takes political forms. Stu dents demonstrate for the Right or the Left, protest against visiting politicians or the con tinued presence of foreigners, demand the re lease of political prisoners. A mass gathering may overflow into a riot, and such a riot can be a spark that ignites a larger fire. Today's U.S. student riots are pranks run wild, fanned by mass-media publicity and the mobility of our population into activities that involve not a few hundred but many thou sands of students. In the past, each college could think up its own troublemaking activities each spring, and the fracas with the local police or the fire department ended with a few fines, a night in jail, at most a few expulsions. But today any such activity is given national attention and spreads like wildfire. If the trou blemakers use something difficult to get like the snowballs which Yale rioters threw at the police their activities may not be copied. But if the troublemakers provide an easy model and if publicity provides a detailed description, the new activity may spread with incredible speed, as the panty-raid riots did. If the troublemaking can be tied in with a place (Fort Lauderdale) or a date (the spring . .. xVX.V;''1''- V... .. Bored vacationing students rioted in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1961. This year the community took construc tive countermeasures with dances, games, and parties. holidays; Labor Day), the ensuing activities are all the easier to promote. The styles are old. The scale, the nationwide participation, the numbers of participants all these can be at tributed directly to the magnifying effects of our modern-day ability to communicate ideas (good and bad) fast and far and also our abil ity to hop in a car and "see what's going on." As on all occasions of this kind, the trouble is aggravated by some who pretend to disap prove as well as by others the merchants and the police whose duty it is to prevent trouble by making adequate preparations for a crowd. Some merchants close their shops and try to offer constructive channels for youthful ener gies; others, however, order extra truckloads of beer. Sometimes the police disappear, giving the excitable young a sense of false security. At other times, the police arrive in such large numbers and so well-armed that they appear to be encouraging a dangerous game of cops and robbers. Sometimes one side or the other miscon strues the situation, and the result is bloodied heads and filled jails. But a riot can also be avoided. On a Midwest campus the dean of women filled a wheelbarrow with girls' panties, wheeled it into the center of the campus, and called out: "Come and get them!" At that moment, the fun evaporated. There were no takers ; there was no riot. ONE OTHER element enters into riots. This is the desire to effect action immediately in stead of working toward some goal. We see this when idealists mass at state capitals or in Wash ington to protest about something instead of settling down soberly to win adherents. Philoso pher Bertrand Russell forcing British authori ties to send him to jail and the masses of moth ers with baby carriages insistently parading the streets in a "peace strike" are not unrelated to the masses of students invading seaside re sorts and the masses of younger teen-agers fol lowing their example. But overshadowing all factors, penetrating everywhere is our tendency to popularize the ridiculous, blowing up the size of what happens, eagerly reporting what one part of the world is doing and what the rest may be doing next. As long as publicity, the forces of law and order, the commercial interests who profit by the sale of gas and beer and hot dogs, continue to endorse student high jinks there will be more riots and more serious ones. But one sober, imaginative effort to prevent them, to reduce the whole thing to ridicule and put it in context, would be enough. Like the dean of women with her wheelbarrow, one adequate, extravagant, mocking answer would help deflate the picture, and this particular form of rioting would become history. Whatever the stripes on the top of the socks, the kids who tried it would no longer be reported as "swinging." COVER: "The Resurrection," by 15th-century Flem ish artist Memling, is one of the treasures of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Easter also has profound meaning forauthorCatherine Marshall. Read her inspiring story, p. i. LEONARD S. DAVIDOW I'rcdrnt and l',,blr, WALTER C DREYFUS I'lVr r'rr.idVnl PATRICK E. O'ROURKE ,lcfiv rlunnjr Director MORTON FRANK Director of PnblMicr Uriah Send all advertising communications to Family Weekly, 153 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago I. III. Address all communication! about editorial features to Family Weekly, 60 E. 56th St., New Tork 22, N. T. April 22, 1962 Board of Editors I ERNEST V. HEYN Editor-in-Chief BEN KARTMAN Krrcntivt Editor ROBERT FITZGIBBON Managing Editor MARGARET BELL Feature Editor PHILLIP DYKSTRA Art Director MELANIE DE PROFT Food Editor Rosalyn Abrevaya, Arden Eidell, John Hochmann, Hal London, Jack Ryan; Peer J. Opponfieimer, Hollywood. i 1MJ. FAMILY WEEKLY MAGAZINE, INC., 153 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 1, III. All rights reserved.
