Education: Cane Juice

"School, it is like this. School, it is like big sugar-house. It crush and maul us and spin us round. And we go out sweet like sugar. . . . Life, it is like this too. It whip us and pound us, but we come sweet like sugar. . . . We might come like bagasse. Just cane with all the juice crushed out."

So writes Dr. John Earle Uhler in a novel, Cane Juice, which he published last month.* A Yankee, born in Media, Pa. forty years ago, he had gone to Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge) to be a member of its English department after teaching for eleven years at Johns Hopkins. He admitted he wished to "write a lyrical story of Louisiana life." He visited Louisiana bayous, talked to Creoles and Cajun folk, watched them at work in sugar-houses. Last week Dr. Uhler's cane juice was seething, fermenting angrily.

Dealing with the career of an uncouth but righteous and ambitious Cajun who makes good at Louisiana State, Cane Juice is earnestly, sometimes ably written. Like many another contemporary novel of student life, it introduces toping and lechery. There are observations on the sugar industry (Louisiana State has an Audubon Sugar School) and in the end the hero wins a refined girl ("union of sweet nurtured cane with the rough stock of the wilderness") and is indicated as a potential sugar tycoon.

A Baton Rouge priest, Rt. Rev. Mgr. F. J. Gassier, read Cane Juice with rising indignation. Last fortnight he circulated a mimeographed attack upon it. Excerpts: "Utter ignorance of Creole customs. . . . Did the author perchance pick his 'young ladies' in a bawdy house? . . . Caricature. . . . Unsullied reputation of our Creole maidens. . . . Nauseating. . . . Filthiness. ... A monstrous slander of the purest womanhood to be found in the U. S. . . . Slimy animalism and mental filth. . . . The author might be a handsome young man for aught we know. The skunk also is a beautiful animal. . . ."

Then began another cause celebre which resulted, as is often the case, in people muttering about "academic freedom," getting up petitions, holding meetings. Dr. Uhler's resignation was at once demanded. Few days later, in spite of sputtering members of the American Association of University Professors (of which Dr. Uhler is a member) and a committee of New Orleans writers headed by Lyle Saxon (Old Louisiana, Lafitte, The Pirate), he was suspended. Then met the University Executive Board, of which Governor Huey Pierce Long is a leading member. Forthwith it dismissed Dr. Uhler.

Louisiana observers remarked: 1) that Baptist Governor Long, engaged in tussling with Lieut. Governor Paul Cyr over his job (see p. 13), might win Catholic sympathy by a tactful gesture in the direction of complaining Mgr. Gassier; 2) that Dr. Uhler (and three others) won a libel suit a year ago against one Kemble Kenneth Kennedy, 29, friend and protege of Governor Long who had published an obscene, yawping edition of the University Whangdoodle, calling Dr. Uhler a narcotic addict and a lecher. For this Protege Kennedy was sentenced to a year in jail, was at once reprieved by Governor Long.