Witches' Sabbath

Sir:

Are any among us truly amazed that one John G. Winant could no longer endure this age [TIME, Nov. 10]? The marvel is that many more of us have not taken the same way out. We have lived through ten years of hell--the most diabolical "witches' sabbath" ever put on since the beginning of recorded time. Thirty million people, men, women & children, have been starved, tortured, shot, blown to bits, frozen, gassed*--murdered by every conceivable method of fiendish cruelty --mostly at the hands of "civilized, enlightened, cultured, progressive, democratic Christian nations." And the end is not yet. We have with us many who talk and write glibly of the coming atomic war with Russia. . . .

Let's give up that word civilized until we've earned the right to use it. ... Let's never again have the effrontery to call ourselves Christians, until we've grasped a few of the fundamentals.

If only some power could take from us our smugness, self-satisfaction, our naive belief that now as a race we really have arrived somewhere; if we could face our barbarism honestly we might eventually do something about it.

(MRS.) GERTRUDE S. HURDLE

Billings, Mont.

Sacred Cow

Sir:

The critics who snipe at radio must be hitting pretty close to home if Veteran Radioman Ratner wraps himself in the folds of Old Glory [TIME, Nov. 10] ... just because someone puts the finger on a particularly obnoxious commercial or an especially sloppy soap opera.

As long as we can lambaste the Administration, give Congress the needle, and amend the Constitution, the Founding Fathers won't turn in their graves if the highbrows heckle the hucksters. . . .

Mr. Ratner blames our educational system for "The People's Taste." Can any business which is beamed directly at the small fry for two hours of blood, thunder and box tops every weekday afternoon disclaim its role in our educational system? . . .

Andrei Vishinsky, at his nastiest, never insulted us as did Mr. Ratner with the bland pronouncement that "radio's made in the image of the American people," whose intellectual horizons are bounded by "comic books, Betty Grable . . . broad comedy and simple drama". . . .

If radio wants to be a Sacred Cow, let her at least produce good milk. . . .

R. A. RIESMAN

Providence, R.I.

Sir:

Shame on Radioman Ratner. . . . Does radio aspire no higher than the "judgment of the majority of adult Americans?" No wonder I enjoyed it much more when I was in high school. . . .

Let Ratner read the Preamble of the Constitution once more and get the dollar sign out of his eyes if he wants to see the true image of the American People.

C. E. SITZ

Akron

Man [and Woman] of the Year

Sir:

Please let me be amongst the first to nominate and plead for your recognition of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt as the Woman of the Year. Her unstinting work in behalf of human relations has been unquestionably outstanding.

PAUL W. DALEY

Aurora, Ill.

Sir:

... I think Secretary of State George C. Marshall deserves the honor, and that his wife should have a place in the background of his picture.

EDNA L. GRANT

West Haven, Conn.

Sir:

As usual, my wife and I were unable to agree. So enclosed are both our nominations for Man of the Year.

There are two criteria for picking the Man of the Year: who had the biggest rise to fame, and who did the most to change the news for better or for worse. . . .

Man of the Year: Andrei Gromyko, a comparatively unknown diplomat, during 1947 became a household symbol of the voice of revolutionary Communism.

CLAUDE H. MORTER

Man of the Year: George Catlett Marshall . . . [who] led the efforts to contain the drive of the Soviet Union.

(MRS.) GAYLE SMITH MORTER

Dallas

Campus Prejudice

Sir:

The action of Iris Alexander [TIME, Nov. 10] is a bright spot in a world full of hate, prejudice and, perhaps worst of all, indifference. . . .

HARRIET ELKINGTON

Philadelphia

[Wisconsin Coed Iris Alexander went to a campus party, let a Negro student walk home with her, talked a while with him on the porch. Result: her roominghouse landlord told her to move out.--ED.]

Sir:

I believe that the actions of people like Coed Iris Alexander do nothing but cause more racial tension.

Landlord Arthur Rupe's action was justified.

JOHN S. JANOS

Cleveland

"Are You a Communist?"

Sir:

In your article on the Hollywood hearing [TIME, Nov. 3], you report cries of "unAmerican" and "unconstitutional" as coming "from the Left." You then dogmatically state, "NonCommunist friends who sided with them were talking through their hats."

Sir, I happen to be a Democrat and a Protestant, but I question the constitutional or moral right of any congressional committee to force me to state under oath whether I am now or ever have been a member of the Democratic Party or of a Protestant Church.

Until it actually becomes a crime to be a Communist or an atheist, I think that Communists and atheists should be left equally free either to talk or to remain silent about their political and religious beliefs. . . .

BRYANT D. ROWLAND

San Pablo, Calif.

Sir:

... I abhor Communism and those associated with it. Yet, I cannot see by what right the Thomas committee or anyone else inquires into anyone's Communistic affiliations. This party has not been declared subversive. It has not been officially declared to be operating by and for a foreign power. If this Government feels that the Communist Party is subversive, it certainly should be outlawed. When it is outlawed, the Thomas committee and other authorities would be entitled to ask of a man, "Are you a Communist?" Until such time as the Communist Party is outlawed as a threat to this country, no one can have that right. . . .

T. W. FARNSWORTH JR.

New Bedford, Mass.

Sir:

TIME was apparently talking through both sides of its mouth when it said that there is a great difference between questioning the official behavior of a congressional committee and charging it with being illegal or having violated civil liberties.

I am critical of the Thomas committee because I believe that its official procedures either violate or may lead to a violation of civil liberties. I have never split any philosophical hairs to discover whether I question the procedures or their results. Attempting to distinguish between the two attitudes is analogous to differentiating between those who object to the cat on the back fence and those who object to his yowling. Either attitude may lead one to throw a shoe at the animal. . . .

Since civil liberties have become a "party line" concern, does TIME conclude that anyone who worries about them is, ipso facto, a Communist sympathizer? ...

MAX G. COOPER

Vermillion, S.Dak.

P: Of course not.--ED.

Sir:

After reading your account of the Un-American Activities Committee's un-American activities, I came across this excerpt from Thomas Jefferson's First inaugural Address (March 4, 1801), which seems to me to stand as a cogent rebuke to this brand of "Americanism."

"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

PAUL F. EBBITT

Newport, R.I.

Good Tunes for the Devil

Sir:

Shut my big unamused mouth if I don't think the Thomas Committee is a disgrace to the United States. ... As for myself, Mrs. Rogers, Mr. Warner and any other witnesses who claim for me Communist Party membership are talking windily thru their hearsay.

As to the film, None But the Lonely Heart, written and directed by me ... it won praise everywhere, in even the most conservative press; and finally was called "best picture of the year" by the National Board of Review. It was honored, too, by a distinguished musical score written by Hanns Eisler, which likewise won unusual press praise everywhere.

Of course, everyone knows there is an un-American conspiracy existent in Hollywood. It consists in degrading and knocking out the brains of the entire American people by a relentless distribution of the hopelessly vulgar and neurotically superficial trash called the Hollywood film. The rare exception only proves the rule. But it will be some time before I am sufficiently unsexed to relinquish my very American dream of a nation of mature and great people to the cynical Hollywood conception of human life.

In conclusion, I get damn tired of hearing crackpots here and in Washington constantly ascribing anything really human in films to the Communists alone. Why do they keep giving the Devil all the good tunes?

CLIFFORD ODETS

Hollywood

Slack Magic Sir:

Please refer Oct. 27 issue . . . describing rving Berlin's piano prowess.

Mr. Berlin must be good if the only key he knows is F sharp. The key signature for F harp is six (6) sharps. I doubt if he composes in the extreme key of F sharp.

What you intended to say, I believe, is that Mr. Berlin composes or writes only in the key of G, which of course has a key signature of one (1) sharp, namely F sharp. After that his trick piano goes to work on transposition.

DOUGLAS F. RHODES

Petrolia, Ont.

P: No, F sharp. He uses all the black keys.--ED.

Hunter's Tale

Sir:

"Perhaps the earth's poles were in different places then [in the ice age], allowing a temperate zone to curve unbroken al the way from the U.S. to Peru" [TIME, NOV. 3].

Forty years ago some young fellows of a surveying party sat around a fire on the shore of Lake Alturas in the high wilderness of Idaho, across the divide from what is now Sun Valley. We were yawning about that beautiful but godawful country, and how come most of it stood on end.

Old Bill, the hunter, who kept the camp supplied with meat, had been around a long time and a lot of places. Up in Alaska said Bill, "I saw big hairy elephants buried in the ice. Not only them, but ferns high as a tree and palms. That country was in the tropics at one time."

He said, "I figure the way it happened was this. Around the North Pole and the South Pole snow falls year after year but it doesn't melt. It falls and packs down, and more falls and packs down, and that kept on until after a million years or so the old world got top-heavy on each end of the axis.

"So finally she got out of balance and went flip, flop, flip, SOCKO ! When she balanced herself again she was on a new axis, the old North and South Poles were at the equator and a lot of the old tropical country around the new poles. That sort of explains Noah's flood, too," said Bill.

GEORGE A. JOHNS

Monkton, Md.

Three Barks for the Head!

Sir:

I was amused by your write-up on my old school, Shawnigan Lake, and its headmaster [TIME, Nov. 3], although I question whether the article properly belonged under "Education." As a pupil I always had a vague feeling that I was sharing a common experience with Mr. Lonsdale's German shepherds, and am now glad to learn from the Head's own lips that canines and humans are equally amenable to his educational methods. Rousseau and all these other modern pedagogues may think that boy-training is a somewhat subtler process than dog-training, but that's obviously poppycock. Come on, old dogs, three rousing barks for the Head!

ROGER Y. STANIER, M.A., PH.D.

Assistant Professor

University of California

Berkeley, Calif.

Difficult Distinction

Sir:

Please accept my congratulations on Sam Welles's analysis of Germany [TIME, Nov. 3].

I spent almost a year in Germany with Military Government, in the unit conducting opinion surveys among the German population. I know how difficult it is to distinguish between apparent and real facts in Germany; Mr. Welles, in his report, is one of very few correspondents who appears to have been able to make this distinction.

It is encouraging to know that there do exist reporters and publications willing to print the truth as it really is and not only as it appears.

HENRY HALPERN

Princeton, NJ.

Transatlantic Likeness

Sir:

How many letters did you get commenting on the terrific likeness of your cover painting of Sir Stafford Cripps [TIME, Nov. 10] and our own late President Wilson?

ROSEMARY KLEIN

Columbus, Ohio

P: Eight.--ED.

Word Wanted

Sir:

De Gaulle calls the Communists "separatists" [TIME, Oct. 27], and it is ... stated that he rarely deigns to mention them by name. It seems to me that he has something there.

There is a deep gulf between communistic theory and practice: the envisioned ideal state of happiness becomes in actuality a totalitarian government ruling in the most autocratic manner. It may be that we are abetting Red propaganda every time we use the term "Communist." . . . A person in our country who favors Russia and its ideology must be either a knave or a fool, and the Communists themselves must have their dupes and stooges as well as their helpless victims. Let's aid the cause of democracy in the U.S. and abroad by developing an authentic, descriptive word. . . .

H. V. RICHARDS

Salt Lake City

* Estimates run as high as 42.5 millions, of which 24.9 millions are civilian deaths and 17.6 millions are military.--ED.

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