Minorities in the Majority
Sir:
I have just finished reading your story on Robert Wagner [Oct. 1]. It was a fine piece of writing, and strikes one like a breath of fresh air in this year's humid political atmosphere.
MRS. WALTER HOSHAL Toledo
Sir:
Not only will Javits carry the upstate vote, but I am willing to wager that he will break the Democratic bloc of New York City. Javits sounds more like a Democrat than Wagner.
T. F. ZAMBOS Long Beach, Calif.
Sir:
The picture of the St. Patrick's Day parade shows everybody out of step but the mayor. H. W. CARROLL Hammond, La.
P:Let Reader Carroll look again (see cut). The mayor (front) has one supporter, named Michael Anthony Murphy.--ED.
Sir:
The assumption that Jews voted for Bob Wagner Sr. in the 1932 election because they were fooled into believing that he was of Jewish descent is an insult to the intelligence of Jewish voters. It is a well-known fact that Wagner won handsomely in "Jewish" districts because of his liberalism in domestic and foreign affairs. Most Jews vote according to their traditional ideals. This is the "Jewish" vote.
RABBI HERSCHEL LEVIN Flushing, N.Y.
Sir:
The bit about Wagner Sr.'s Lutheran grandfather and his inked-in yarmulke is a nice piece of political "skullcapduggery."
HENRY L. KIRCHNER Broken Arrow, Okla.
Sir:
Your Oct. 1 cover story, speaking of Jacob Javits, noted that "on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jewish ritual forebade his riding in a car," and he therefore "walked across a twelve-mile radius on Manhattan's Upper West Side to visit six synagogues." Your readers ought to know that the same Jewish ritual that forbids riding also forbids electioneering on Yom Kippur.
JACQUELINE BERNSTEIN
New York City
Sir:
You state that young Bob Wacner "won elocution medals for his delivery of 'Spartacus to the Gladiators' and 'How Rudv
Played.'" The latter title should be "How Ruby Played." It described a piano performance by Anton Rubinstein.
RUTH MARTIN FRY Los Angeles
The Campaign
Sir:
Will the American people ever learn? la 1944 they elected a walking corpse President of the United States. Will they repeat that costly blunder in 1956?
JOE M. TEASDALE Fargo, N. Dak.
Sir:
I'm a little weary of this Democratic talk about Republican rich men. How about the inherited wealth of Stevenson, Harriman,
Roosevelt, Kennedy and Mesta? Have any of these Democrats ever felt the dirt of grimy labor on their hands like Eisenhower, Hoover and Wilson ?
MRS. HENRY E. EATON Granville, Ohio
Sir:
The campaign's biggest joke to date: Kefauver's asking what would happen to the country if Nixon became President.
RALPH E. NYE Webster Groves, Mo.
Sir:
With apologies to the well-known radio jingle and reference to the stock market:
You'll wonder where your profits went, If Stevenson becomes President.
ARTHUR F. HOGGARD
San Francisco
Family Talk
Sir:
If "Woman Voter" Monica Thomas, who wrote that embarrassing insult to American womanhood [Oct. il, is so concerned with putting an appealing; family group into the White House, I should like to suggest that next time she start the ball rolling early for the Gabor sisters.
LOUIS RONDRR New York City
Nun's Story
Sir:
Reader G. H. Lindsey's letter [Oct. il referring to The Nun's Story displays in a very few words the prejudice, bigotry and intolerance that he attributes to the cloister. He is certainly guilty of presumption in professing to "know" in what kind of world God meant Gabrielle Van der Mai to live. I think she might be one of the first to object to his interpretation of her decision.
IDA M. BETZLER Canton, Ohio
Sir:
Regarding Reader Lindsey's claim that members of religious orders flout their Creator, let me say that the religious life is indeed not natural. On the contrary, it is supernatural in its very constitution.
PAUL J. Roos Pittsburgh
Two-Way Waterway
Sir: Your article about the Gulf Waterway [Oct. 1] was interesting, but as a sensitive taxpayer I would like to know why the users of the waterway could not use their annual $83 million saving to build the cross-Florida extension. They get the benefits in real cash savings, so why should we taxpayers pay their future bills?
DAVID F. MYRICK San Francisco
Sir:
You have rendered a great public service in calling attention, so graphically and convincingly, to the economic value of the Intracoastal Waterway.
R. N.DOSH Ocala, Fla. Mai de Merde Sir: Much as I am flattered by your reference to me as "the high priest" of something, even something called ''merde'' [Oct. 1|, I must put in my two cents' worth of protest. The gentleman quoted, Dean Fitch, may have gone to Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, but he went to it with a pair of tin ears and came out of it with a tin horn to blow. Cat is the most highly, intensely moral work that I have produced, and that is what gives it power. It is an outcry of fury, from start to finish, against those falsities in life that provide a good fertilizer for corruption. What it says, in essence, through the character of Big Daddy, is this: when your time comes to die, do you want to die in a hotbed of lies or on a cold stone of truth ?
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Charlotte Amalie, V.I.
Sir:
The word that so preoccupies Dean Fitch is one of the most ambiguous, and in a way most honorable, words in the French language. In theatrical, military and other circles, merde is not a dirty word by any means, but a form of farewell and best wishes considered far more profound and more affectionate than other, more ordinary phrases. It has the special distinction of being called "the five-letter word." It is also called the mot de Cambronne because General Cam-bronne, when asked to surrender to the British at Waterloo, anticipated America's General McCauliffe by some 132 years and replied: "Merde I"
ROBERT MIZELL New York City
How's That Again? SIR: PUBLISHER LEO HIRSCHFIELD OF ATHLETIC PUBLICATIONS [OCT. l] HAS ME QUASI-CONFUSED. WHEN HE SAYS "SEMI-OCCASIONALLY," DOES HE MEAN RATHER DEMI-SELDOM OR PRETTY DEMI-OFTEN ?
(T/SGT.) JOHN L. DROSTE
GEORGE AIR FORCE BASE, CALIF.
A Word for It
Sir: Since the word "boycott" was coined after Captain Boycott's tyranny, why can't the word "randolph" be interpolated in the English language meaning a memory blank or a "blackout," as Mr. Randolph Churchill so suavely put it [at the end of his flop on the $64,000 Question] ? Perhaps students will now "randolph" their exams?
THERESE CHADWICK Montreal, Que.
The Demythologizer
Sir:
Thanks to Theologian Rudolf Bultmann ["Christianity and Myth," Sept. 24] for publicly pulling down some of our teetering tenets. Thanks for allowing to come into our minds the clean, fresh breath of God.
(THE REV.) D. G. ALEXANDER Springerville, Ariz.
Sir:
It is obvious that Rudolf Bultmann is as incapable of writing a correct analysis of God's Word as a Communist would be of writing a correct treatise on how to tell the truth.
DONALD L. MORSE Bath, Me.
Sir:
I have no recollection of the source of the following, but I offer it anyway:
Hark ! The herald angels sing "Bultmann is the latest thing." At least, they would if he had not Demythologized the lot.
J. FRANCIS
Cambridge, England
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