New Look
Sir:
For many young Republicans like myself, TIME'S condensed look at Harold Stassen [TIME, April 26] was right up our alley . . .
Indeed it is not surprising that professional G.O.P. politicos who have said "He's a good pan, but he can't be nominated" are hurrying for that second look.
EDWARD T. PARMELEE
Forest Hills, N.Y.
Viva Toscanini!
Sir:
Thanks to your excellent article on Toscanini [TIME, April 26], a great musical luminary has become, in addition, a kindly old gentleman with great charm. TIME has outdone itself.
JAMES E. FEARN Washington, D.C.
Sir:
... A little debunking of the Toscanini legend would be a healthy thing for this country . . .
NORMAN JOHNSON
Los Angeles, Calif.
Sir:
One composer Toscanini can't do right--Mozart.
GEORGE Cox
New York City
Sir:
. . . For more than 20 years I have read, heard, and now have to smell those same anecdotes about the Maestro . . .
DONALD KISSANE
La Grande, Ore.
Sir:
If Conductor Toscanini exercises such rigid control over RCA Victor releases, how did it happen that his recording of Beethoven's Eroica, which is marred at the outset by two highly audible coughs, came to be issued?
T. D. LENT
Omaha, Neb.
P:Because Toscanini considered it a satisfactory recording. It was made during a broadcast and the coughs were audience-contributed.--ED.
Meat-Eater More
Sir:
With regard to the letters from Symon Gould and E. L. Pratt [TIME, May 3], and your quote from my Humanist as Hero; the Life of Sir Thomas More to substantiate what you previously wrote about More's meat-eating habits, let me add that what Erasmus says comes from a very long and detailed letter about his closest friend.
However, if people will take the trouble to read the Utopia carefully and intelligently, they will find in it no defense of vegetarianism. The book does indeed contain a number of things not to be taken too seriously; for instance, the absence of all lawyers in Utopia, the presence of women priests, the practice of euthanasia (which has made the members of the Euthanasia Society very stupidly claim More as a patron) . . .
There is an account of the two religious sects of the Utopians; one of these sects abstains from meat and also from marriage, the other sect "love the flesh of four-footed beastes, bicause they beleve that by that meat they be made hardier and stronger to woorke. The Utopians counte this secte the wiser, but the other the holier . . ."
Though [More] was moderate in eating and drinking, he was never fussy and he tried to avoid all singularity. No man ever lived who was less of a faddist. He did eat meat, and was specially fond of corned beef.
THEODORE MAYNARD
Port Washington, N.Y.
Revolutionary Differences
Sir:
The dictum attributed to Maurice Thorez: "There is less difference between a revolutionary and a nonrevolutionary than there is between two revolutionaries" [TIME, April 26] sounds like a garbled version of the famous gibe of Robert de Jouvenel, made a generation ago: "There is less difference between two deputies, one of whom is a revolutionary and the other isn't, than between two revolutionaries, one of whom is a deputy and the other isn't." Thorez is a deputy.
D. W. BROGAN
Cambridge, England
Untrue Story
Sir:
... In reporting the marriage of Bernarr Macfadden, you refer to him [TIME, May 3] as the publisher of True Story. Mr. Macfadden has no connection of any kind with this publication, nor has he had since March 1941 . . .
O. J. ELDER
New York City
P:Time flies.--ED.
Pragmatic Colossus
Sir:
Your article on Canada's reaction to the idea of customs union with the U.S. [TIME, April 26] misrepresented the depth of Canadian feeling . . . Canada is more unanimously and fervently opposed to economic union than you intimated . . .
We take a somewhat more objective view of world affairs, and feel ourselves more directly concerned in the welfare of the whole rather than the exposition of a single foreign policy . . .
We like Americans, and cherish our close association with the U.S.; but there are many things in American culture which we resent, many aspects of our own life that we regard as superior. Finally, we are not prepared to sacrifice Canadian ideals, desires or culture to the colossus of a pragmatic system, which destroys ends for the sake of means.
PETER B. WAITE
University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C.
Frosted Lives
Sir:
It has long been my personal belief that of all the members of human society, those who most deserve the pity and compassion of ordinary mortals are the professional psychologists and psychiatrists.
It is most significant to learn from "Frosted Children" [TIME, April 26] that there is one of their number (Dr. Leo Kanner) who is investigating this very possibility, and that he dares to expose the dangers it may impose on present and future generations. How can such individuals be expected to breed anything but frosted children? . . .
Is it not possible that psychologists and psychiatrists become so habitually self-analytical that they have conditioned themselves away from the ability to respond to ordinary human events with any vestiges of the primordial senses, thus becoming automatons whose actions are unaffected by any dictates of the heart and soul?
LURLYNE B. MARTIN
Washington, D.C.
Americans Change Fast
Sir:
Cyril Connolly complains that in TIME of April 12 we did him an injustice by crediting to him, among others, the view "that the life and vigor of America are the world's true death." Mr. Connolly's complaint is justified. The reference to him is a fair summary of an impression sometimes conveyed by Mr. Connolly's magazine, Horizon, but not of what Mr. Connolly himself has recently said or written. A truer statement of his views is to be found in his own introduction to the October 1947 issue of Horizon [TIME, Oct. 20]:
". . . As Europe becomes more helpless, the Americans are compelled to become farseeing and responsible, as Rome was forced by the long decline of Greece to produce an Augustus, a Vergil . . . Something important is about to happen, as if the wonderful jeunesse of America were suddenly to retain their idealism and vitality and courage and imagination into adult life, and become the wise and good who make use of them; the old dollar values are silently crumbling, and the selfcriticism, experimental curiosity, sensibility and warmth [of America] are on then-way in. For Americans change very fast . . ."
JOHN OSBORNE
London, England
Which Code D'Ya Read?
Sir:
... If Mrs. Edison answered her husband's proposal of marriage by saying --[TIME, April 26], she was using gibberish which even the genius of Edison could not decipher.
If she accepted his proposal in Morse code, what she said was: ........
It was many years after the marriage of the Edisons that some officious crackpot attempted to gild the lily by changing the perfectly simple Morse code into the more difficult "International" code.
MAURICE B. GATLIN
New Orleans, La.
P: ........ --En.
Harlem Report
Sir:
In September 1943 a group of public-spirited laymen joined with the Board of Education of New York City in a two-year project to reduce delinquency in Harlem by providing additional school services and personnel to P.S. 10, J.H.S. 101 and J.H.S. 120 . . . The Report [on that project] stressed the delinquencies of some young people and the inability of the schools to do much about them.
In the April 5 issue of TIME, you took . . . only unfavorable, isolated excerpts from this Report ... By making it appear that occasional incidents are characteristic of the school and community life, you gave your readers an entirely false picture of the schools concerned, their pupils and their teachers.
You described the schools as "dingy and dilapidated." What are the facts? The Report itself is in error when it says "many of the buildings were erected before 1900." Out of 26 schools in Harlem, only three were built before 1900 . . .
Yes, Harlem had its gangs that mimicked on the streets the warfare their older brothers were waging in Europe and in the Pacific. But such activities were not confined to Harlem, nor to the city of New York. Actually, the school was one bright spot where law and order prevailed. We quote from the Harlem Report: "The school (J.H.S. 120) was run in a businesslike, efficient way with discipline well maintained, pupils orderly in halls and on stairways -- a generally well-kept building. Principal, teachers and pupils deserved credit for this . . ."
During the entire life of the project we were in the midst of a world war . . . There was a real teacher shortage . . .
Under the circumstances it is understandable that ... an occasional teacher under provocation would lapse in the matter of corporal punishment. That any of these teachers "hated" children simply is not so ...
WILLIAM JANSEN
Superintendent of Schools
New York City
P:TIME, which read (or misread) the Report in substantial agreement with the New York City press, is glad to hear that conditions in the Harlem schools are better than reported. --ED.
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