Student Rag

"What would be the reaction of Canadians," asked a Toronto Globe and Mail columnist last week, "if students at the University of Wisconsin draped themselves like the Ku Klux Klan, formed a procession and hanged and burned an effigy of Premier Leslie Frost. Prime Minister St. Laurent or George Drew?"

The newspaper had fixed its disapproving glance on a Halloween rag at the University of Toronto in which undergraduates staged a mock lynching and burned U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in effigy. Shrouded in bedsheet hoods, hundreds of students swarmed across the campus chanting, "Burn McCarthy!" and "Down with Joe!" After the dummy guest of honor had been hanged from a scaffold and put to the torch, speakers denounced McCarthy's "terror tactics." An outgrowth of days of bull sessions on "McCarthyism." the demonstration evoked mixed reactions even on the campus. When the student newspaper Varsity took a favorable stand. News Editor Paul Bacon resigned, commenting: "I dislike Communism to the extent that I feel any measures directed against its destruction are fair." Varsity insisted: "The burning succeeded in its purpose ... It brought to the surface one of the most threatening movements of the postwar world."

Said the Globe and Mail columnist in an appropriate final word: "Spare us any more of these symbols which evoke . . . religious bigotry, boll-weevil decadence and depraved mumbo jumbo."

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