Letters: Jun. 7, 1926

Herewith are excerpts from letters come to the desks of the editors during the past week. They are selected primarily for the information they contain either supplementary to or corrective of news previously published in TIME.

Bok-Wilson

Sirs:

As one who voted thrice for Woodrow Wilson, I beg to remonstrate. Omitting all question of pulchritude, Edward W. Bok looks no more like our martyred hero than Benny Leonard* looks like William Howard Taft. Did you ever see Bok? Have you any one’s word for the “striking likeness” [TIME, May 31, p. 17] besides his? The distinguished immigrant-editor-publicist-pacifist has a fleshier face than President Wilsons ever was. His type is far less intellectual, broader, heavier in every way; strong—yes—but not so magnificently “horse-jawed . . . lean templed . . . highbrowed.” You published an excellent but disrespectful description of Woodrow Wilson, all but the “longish ears,” which you must have transplanted from a Bok photograph where they are indeed to be seen. President Wilson’s ears were rounded and thin, often noticed them and was infuriated more than once by cartoons. . . . And one more point: you need not have been so sarcastic about Twice Thirty as to (Call it “one of Mr. Bok’s autobiographies.” He has written only two so far.

FREDERICK SLEDGE Philadelphia, Pa.

“Wonderful Thing” Sirs:

Permit me to thank you for the very decent and extraordinarily honest treatment thus far of my newspapers and myself by your magazine. It is indeed a wonderful thing to see a magazine take such an impartial and straight viewpoint, allowing freedom and fairness to both sides of the question. _

CORNELIUS VANDERBILT JR. New York, N. Y.

Could Not Sleep

Sirs: All my life I have heard of only one man to whom the expression “a fiend in human form” seemed justly applicable and not melodramatic. That man is the German motion picture director. Schultz** whom you describe in TIME, May 31, p. 14. The man who would spring a trap under two horses, send them crunching off a cliff to their death, and finally have motion pictures taken of their agony, is not a man—he is in truth a fiend. I have never written a letter to a magazine before, but I could not sleep last night, thinking of Schultz. I have had to write, and “get it out of my system.”

ROGER J. MARLBOROUGH New York, N. Y.

Again, Busch

Sirs:

With the puerile squeamishness of most Americans you seem unable to appreciate that when director Schwarz of the German U.F.A. picture company, was presented with a script in which two horses were supposed to fall off a cliff and be killed, his artistic honesty allowed him no other course than to follow the script. Some of your readers sneered at me when I wrote you about von Richthofen—and you, of course, printed their sneers [TIME, Dec. 14, 28]. No German would have done that! We Germans—many of us at least—are strong enough to see the world as it is and to laugh at the terrors which two dead horses seem to hold for you.

KARL BUSCH Madison, Wis.

Loves Poe

Sirs : I felt really bad, on reading on p. 38 TIME, April 5, “Psychic Impotence” not only bad but sad, and mean, too.

Why can’t they let the unhappy man rest? All these psychiatrists and rowdy critics who endeavor to shred up Poe s soul, have not uttered a single word that would bring before one’s eye the beauty, the immensity of a soul in love with beauty”or the melodious music that sings itself in each line of Poe’s poetry.

Their receptiveness, their spontaneity, must be dull indeed if they fail to be ecstatic over “To Helen,” “Ulalume,” “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells, ” “The Haunted Palace,” “Israfel” and the crowning glory of “The Raven,” or they would not glibly drop such sentences as “two-fifths sheer fudge.”

They are the sort who doubt a Divine Providence; they can only make themselves heard by linking their own names with that of a genius.

Please make it a part of your highly esteemed items to say a word in behalf my beloved Poe.

MRS. GERTRUDE BERKMAN Woonsocket, R. I.

Monitor v. Merrimac

Sirs:

Editor Victor E. Lawson of the Willmar (Minn.) Tribune, in his letter published in TIME, May 24, p. 2, reiterates the fiction that the Confederate ship Merrimac (Virginia) was defeated by, and “fled” from, Ericsson’s Monitor.

An editor should be sufficiently informed and honest not to perpetrate such an arrant canard in a matter of history. The oft repeated contention that the Monitor defeated the Merrimac is refuted even by Federal historians themselves. Without vouching for the records (which I shall be glad to do for you or for Mr. Lawson), it seems sufficient to the purposes of this brief letter to quote Ericsson himself. He did not consider that the Monitor won the fight, and said in a letter written Nov. 24, 1874:

“Why? Because she had a miserable executive officer, who, instead of jumping into the pilot house when Worden was wounded, ran away with his impregnable vessel.”

In 1884 the Monitor’s crew claimed bounty for the destruction of the Merrimac. A congressional committee investigated the facts and rejected the claim on the ground “that the Merrimac, so far from being seriously injured, was enabled after the engagement to protect the approaches to Norfolk and Richmond until after the evacuation of Norfolk”. (H. R. Reports, 1725, 48th Congress, 1st Session.)

If Mr. Lawson’s contention is sound, one wonders why the Monitor did not capture the Merrimac, and why the Monitor herself fled to shoal water and to the protection of Fortress Monroe when the Merrimac twice came down the river and offered fight.

R. M. HUGHES JR. Norfolk, Va.

“Don’t Quibble”

Sirs:

In TIME, May 31, p. 15, in a review of The Great God Brown, you speak of “the unwritten commandment that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s brains.”

Are you actually so devoid of all knowledge of Holy Scripture as to suppose that there is not written in every Bible, in every language, the Tenth Commandment:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.

The clause “nor anything that is thy neighbour’s” certainly includes “brains.”

God put it in to make quibblers ashamed of themselves. So don’t you try to quibble out of this. You can’t.

GERTRUDE E. PRINDERVILLE Patchogue, L. I.

Blaustein Flayed

I wish I could get at Blaustein—the greedy man who wrote [TIME, May 31] asking you to print a special New York edition of TIME—the conceited one who asked you, “Why is not New York news a department by itself ?”

All I can say is I’d like to tell him!

Don’t you editors spend a cent of the money we 90,000 non-New Yorkers invest in TIME on any such sectional scheme! Of course my subscription isn’t a legal “investment,” but your policy of asking editorially for the opinions of readers makes me feel that I own one one-hundred-eight-thousandth of the “moral stock” of TIME.

My “vote” is “NO” to Blaustein’s little scheme for hogging TIME. Let the New Yorkers pay you for getting out a New York TIME if they like TIME as much as we non-New Yorkers do, and want to be so exclusive. Let ’em—if they’ll pay!

MANNY DAVIDSON Duluth, Minn.

Published weekly by TIME, Inc., at The Penton Building. Lakeside Ave. and West Third St., Cleveland, Ohio. Subscriptions $5 a year. Entered as second-class matter Aug. 25, 1925. at the post office, Cleveland, Ohio, under the act of March 3, 1879.