Letters, May 21, 1934

Cricket Delivery

Sirs:

Re: TIME, issue of May 7, p. 72, last column-Bug in an Ear.”

“…Ellis H. Edwards, obstetrician supped his forceps into her aural canal drew out an object. … The laboratory reported that it was … the skeleton of a cricket.

I hope that he used the otologists forceps, and not his obstetrical forceps.

You meant to say otologist, not obstetrician, did you not?

Although many an obstetrician would gladly deliver anything for a fee, these days, even the skeleton of a cricket. MARIO A. CASTALLO, M. D.

P. S. Did you ever see an obstetrical forceps? Germantown, Pa.

Dr. Edwards, an obstetrician, used otological forceps. He undertook the case on emergency call from the White Plains police department. He had received no fee up to last week, may collect $1 or $2 from the city. — ED. Neglectful Wives

Sirs: While the papers played up Mrs. Roosevelt’s speech at the recent newspapermen’s meeting TIME in its report on that meeting (TIME May 7) made no mention of it at all Good for TIME. “Most women know all there is to be known about cakes and pies and children,” said Mrs. Roosevelt. “What they want is the real facts about all phases of life today.” I strenuously disagree. It seems to me that modern women who go in for “all phases of life day must necessarily neglect the care of their children and the management of their homes. I think it is no reflection on the feminine mind to assert that it doesn’t logically absorb facts about government and economics. If women would spend more time in the study of running a home and less in trying to learn all about world affairs, I think we would have a better country.

I wonder if most other women don’t agree with me. M. B. CLARKE

Englewood, N. J.

Orchid

Sirs:

Allow me to compliment you on the able way

TIME has covered the consecration of the Most

Reverend William D. O’Brien as Titular Bishop

Calinda and Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago in

your issue of May 7.

Discussing this article with one of the priests in our office today, he maintains that the article was written by a priest, while the writer maintains that the article was written by one of your able editorial staff.

Layman or priest, whoever did the job rates an orchid.

HUGH J. BLAKELEY

Director of Advertising Extension Magazine Chicago, Ill.

The story was written by a member of TIME’S staff, which includes no priest. To Adman Blakeley, thanks.—ED. Socialist Clergy Sirs: In your issue April 30, p. 48, in your description of “Fred” Shorter you state “had, like many another thoughtful U. S. minister, turned Socialist.”

Several of us have discussed this statement, and it has occasioned varied reactions.

We depend on your paper to report news only, yet this seems to indicate a serious leaning on the part of the paper to the extreme left. If the quotation is so, the last national election did not show any trend of anybody toward Socialism but away from it.

We would appreciate very much an extended answer to this letter, showing the basis for the statement in quotation marks. There are always a few radicals doing or saying extreme things, but to believe that the leadership of religious thought in the U. S. is Socialist needs real proof. . . .

R. H. GENTRY Los Angeles, Calif.

Last fortnight Preacher-Publicist Kirby Page of Long Island City, N. Y. made public the results of a questionnaire on economic and social beliefs he sent to 100,000 Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis. Of 20,870 replying, 88% chose a “cooperative commonwealth” as the economic system nearest the ideals of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. To achieve this, 51% were for “drastically reformed Capitalism,” 28% for Socialism. Among the 5,879 favoring Socialism: Author Charles Monroe Sheldon (In His Steps); Managing Editor Paul Hutchinson of The Christian Century; Professor Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary; Methodist Missionary Eli Stanley Jones; Episcopal Bishops Edward Lambe Parsons of San Francisco, Arthur Conover Thomson of Norfolk, Va. and Paul Jones of Yellow Springs, Ohio (dioceseless); Methodist Bishops Francis John McConnell of Manhattan and James Chamberlain Baker of San Francisco; Bishop Arthur Raymond Clippinger of the United Brethren Church; Unitarians John Haynes

Holmes of Manhattan and John Rowland Lathrop of Brooklyn; Methodists Halford Edward Luccock of New Haven, Conn. and Ernest Fremont Tittle of Evanston 111.; Baptist Douglas Clyde Macintosh of New Haven; Congregationalist John Ryland Scotford of Manhattan; Episcopalian Walter Russell Bowie.—ED. Vanderbilt Funeral Sirs:

I must protest pp. 40 and 41 of TIME, May 7. that real connection is there between Religion and the funeral of a rich old woman pompous and churchly though it be?

ROBERT MERRITT Wolfeboro, N. H.

Sirs: Although (because I am also a certified P.E.) believe that the officiating clergy, and hope that the mourners, were altogether sincere in their reading and hearing of the late Mrs. Vanderbilt’s funeral service, yet I am troubled not by Mrs. V’s death, not by your reporting it at length, but by the headine under which you placed the news.

To some of those present, and to many of those absent, Business & Finance might have seemed a more suitable heading for Mrs V’s funeral than Religion. And for a very large number of your readers Sport might have been still better. . . .

WINSLOW AMES

New London, Conn.

From prehistoric times among all peoples, religious rites have attended the disposal of the dead. Of the great world religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism and Mohammedanism —none buries its dead without priests. prayers and ceremonies. TIME considered it newsworthy that the matriarch of the Vanderbilts, noted for piety during her lifetime, was put away among good and bad members of her family in a mausoleum as large as many a small church.—ED. Dartmouth’s Michelet Sirs:

May I thank you for the perfectly written account of Robert Henry Michelet, “Dartmouth’s [TIME, April 30]. A few more such articles instead of your usual type and this old world would be a better place to live in.

ELEANORA S. MORGAN

Pomfret, Conn.

Sirs:

O. Henry was one of the best authors that we have had in this country in modern times I admire his style and the cleverness of his stones, but it is hard for me to believe that there is someone on the staff of TIME who is. capable of successfully using his unique manner of writing.

In the April 30 issue of TIME I ran across two items that seemed to me to have been written in rather poor taste. One was the account of a birthday party held at the grave of a little girl, and the other was the article concerning Bob Michelet of Dartmouth.

. . . After the reader had been given an account of the various honors which had been bestowed upon this man during the spring we were told that he had died late in the winter.

When one settles down to read a magazine such as TIME after a day of more or less hard work, he doesn’t desire or expect to be faced with this type of morbid literature. Coming upon it unexpectedly, he is left in a rather peculiar state of mind, a state of mind that can be achieved by reading any number of cheaper publications. At least, he should be able to expect well-written informative material, and he should be able to feel satisfied that he is better off for having read it. …

THOMAS T. CHASE

Hamilton, N. Y. “Arms and the Men” (Cont’d)

Sirs:

Recently at Cornell a student conference on War and Fascism was held, which was largely dominated by a group who held that war is concomitant of capitalism, that Fascism is the last recourse of capitalism, that the only alternative is Communism. A speaker not of this group quoted from “Arms and the Men” [FORTUNE, March 1934] quite extensively. During the discussion I pointed out that capitalists are being reformed with regard to war as evidenced by “Arms and the Men” appearing in FORTUNE whose circulation is almost exclusively “capitalists.” The only answer was from a professional Communist who called FORTUNE “that stinking flower of capitalism.”

I think that TIME shows a very good awareness of our trends to the left, which is a useful service because unless we do move in that direction we may go suddenly and violently all the way, followed by reaction. PAUL MACY

Ithaca, N. Y.

Sirs: I think you may be interested in knowing of the further progress of the 10% pamphlet we made reprinting FORTUNE’S now famous article of the international munition business, “Arms and the Men.” Because this pamphlet is sold at cost, it is not available at bookstores (who would have to add their markup, charge about 16(!). “Arms and the Men” can be had only by sending io(‘ to Garden ‘City, and the only notice that it can so be had appeared in the correspondence column of TIME, yet it is selling faster than Anthony Adverse. Our first printing of 2,500 copies was gone two days after our letter appeared in TIME. We quickly printed 10,000 more, and even these were not enough, because up until today 10,075 people have sent their dimes to Garden City for individual pamphlets and 89 other individuals and organizations have taken 6,411 copies. Total sales to date: 16,486 copies—and a number of schools and other institutions are now considering using quantities of “Arms and the Men.” We have just printed 25,000 more copies, and it looks as if we might sell 100,000, which was our purpose in producing the pamphlet at cost, rather than to do it as a more expensively produced and less widely distributed $1 book. This response is unique in our experience, and not only shows how remarkably large a group of people read the correspondence column of TIME and how carefully they read it, but also how alert is their interest in a subject of importance. DANIEL LONGWELL

Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc. Garden City, N. Y.

Sirs:

I have just finished reading two articles in the May issue of Scribner’s Magazine, “Why America Will Go to War” and “How to Keep Out of the Next War,” by Messrs Grattan and Stoddard. The amazing response and reaction to your article concerning the munition manufacturers [TIME, March 5] prompts me to ask if it would be possible for you to give publicity to these two splendid articles. I believe you would be doing this nation a great service and perhaps be instrumental in keeping these United States out of the next conflagration which seems inevitable, if you could arouse your 450,0 readers to sufficient interest that they, would demand reprints of these two clear, concise, unbiased articles. CHRIS. A. HORN

Schenectady, N. Y..

Author C. Hartley Grattan predicts a repetition of the events of 1914, with the U S. caught between blockading and blockaded powers in the Atlantic. In tl Pacific Japan will use force to stop tl flow of U. S. supplies to Soviet Russia via China. Author Lothrop Stoddard’s anti-War prescription: float no foreign bonds of combatants in the U. S.; trade with combatants for cash or short-term credits; export no arms or munitions. — ED. Haul Sirs:

A good bait: May 7, p. 16 on passage of the Fleet from the Pacific to the Atlantic: of warships … streamed steadily westward through the Panama Canal.”

Please publish the haul.

T. A. CLARK

Lt. Col. U. S. Army

Chicago, 111. None. — ED. Shameful, Shameless

Sirs:

The picture of Samuel Insull on the outside page of TIME [May 14] is shameful, and worse, shameless.

Guilty or not guilty, the poor old man is entitled to some consideration and even that you denied him.

Also your rehashing of the Astor-Gillespie incident on p. 30 is not only disgusting but contemptible.

In the first instance you have put yourself on a level with the old Police Gazette in its palmiest days and in the second you have rivaled scandal-mongering old Town Topics when it was out looking for people to blackmail!

I think my subscription has expired, but if it hasn’t I wish to cancel it, as your photographic reproductions of recent murders have been sickening and I don’t care to have a magazine come into my house which leaves a bad taste in my mouth!

GEORGE EUSTIS CORCORAN

New York City

Sirs:

I am glad that “corpses, when eminently newsworthy, will continue to find a place in TIME [May 14]. Your half million subscribers by no means gum-chewers, need to be shown that people in this country occasionally die a death.

K. P. KEMPTON Newtonville, Mass.

Compliments

Sirs:

With your “Robin Hood” policeman-killer glorifying article [TIME, May 7.1, the editor or editors of TIME may go to Hell with my compliments. There is no post office in Hell and 1 shall be pleased not to hear from you.

C. R. MYRE, M. D.

Paynesville, Minn. sirs:

Is mine the first praise given TIME’S excellent maps? I refer especially to the one dealing with the Russo-Japanese situation which appeared several months ago [TIME, Feb. 12] and to the one of Dillinger Land in the [May 7] issue.

I wish to cast my vote for the Letters Supplement as unique, interesting, amusing. ELOISE PARKER

Montczuma, Ga.