Letters: Letters, Jul. 8, 1935

Garbo’s FeetSirs: Why is there such a to-do about the size of Greta Garbo’s feet (TIME, June 17)?

Almost every woman I know wears a shoe size between six and eight. I could name 20 personable young women, average height and slender, whose feet couldn’t be fitted in less than a six and a half. Even a 5-ft., 90-pounder wears size five.

I’d like to know what size feet the rest of the movie queens totter around on if “7AA” is considered so unusual.

ELIZABETH F. GEARHEART

Shaker Heights, Ohio

At least one film actress, Binnie Barnes, is credited with a larger shoe than Greta Garbo’s — 7½AA. A cursory survey of other foot sizes produces the following: Claire Dodd 7AAA, Helen Vinson 7AA, Joan Blondell 6C, Marion Davies 6B, Carole Lombard 5½A, Norma Shearer 5½A, Jean Harlow 3½C.— ED.

Adorers, Admirers

Sirs:

The traditional orchids and my own humble commendations to you for your splendid, intelligent and unbiased analysis of our “Father” Hutchins and this noble university with its eminently successful “New Plan” [TIME, June 24].Adored by the co-eds and admired by the rest of us, Prexy Hutchins is backed, almost without exception, by a solid student body in his determined stand against the over-zealous news-gathering of a Knox-McCormick-Hearstian press. The majority of students are so intent upon fulfilling the strenuous academic requirements of this institution that they are quite indifferent to the radical tongue-wavings of the very few who apparently take sides not from any soul-deep conviction but for the notoriety of it. One might well suppose that if some of the outside alarmists were a little more exposed to any educational system they would be a mite more broad-minded when it comes to criticizing the teachings of a university as well-conceived and directed as is this one.

Again I thank you for your comprehensive review of the situation; my TIME-respecting family at home as well as the other 499,999 of your subscribers will be glad to know, I am sure, that we are not being coerced into reading the “Primer” by a lot of long-bearded “Reds” armed with machine guns and treatises on free love! …

PAUL GUSTAFSON

Law Class of ’37

Pi Kappa Alpha U. of C. Chicago, Ill.

Sirs:

Hurrah for TIME’s lengthy article under Education in the June 24th issue concerning Chicago’s Hutchins. The entire account was splendid and unbiased, paying tribute to a truly great educator. TIME’soccasional bitterness and scathing sarcasm in regard to prominent people were well omitted in this account of such an outstanding man. JANE SCOULLER

Pontiac, Ill.

“Communist Cancer”

Sirs:

Your jaunty review of the Legislative Committee’s investigation of radicalism at the University of Chicago (TIME, June 24) is as misleading as the idea that anything but a whitewash was conducted, except for Senator Baker. At the farcical hearings every anti-Communist witness with evidence on the subject was shamelessly browbeaten, insulted and repressed.

I waged a bitter battle to present documentary evidence that atheism, free love and disarmament for the sake of Red revolution and dictatorship are the principles of Communism-Socialism and that notorious jailbird Communist agitators, Negro and white, speak constantly in U. of C. halls sponsored by U. of C. authorities. The seditious pronouncements recorded at one Communist Congress alone, held there, should convict the U. of C. authorities under the Illinois sedition law.

President Hutchins himself serves on the board of the Communist Moscow State University, recruiting students to go over to Russia to be trained by Soviet revolutionaries.* Atheism is the first course of the day this summer.

Organized by Communists and Socialists, on April 12, 175,000 U. S. students struck, declaring the peacetime treason that they would never uphold the U. S. Government in any war. The U. of C. Strike Committee, when it marched in the Communist parade May 30th, printed the statement that it represents 2,700 students on the U. of C. campus.

The question before U. S. citizens today is whether or not they want the academic freedom for Communistic cancer which perils the freedom and health of the entire body politic.

ELIZABETH DILLING

Kenilworth, Ill.

After a month spent in Soviet Russia in 1931 Elizabeth Eloise Kirkpatrick (Mrs. Albert Wallwick) Dilling returned to her Chicago suburb to write and publish The Red Network, which includes in its list of some 1,300 U. S. radicals the names of Mrs. Roosevelt, Secretary Ickes, Senator Borah, Professor Irving Fisher and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman. At a hearing of the Illinois Senate committee investigating University of Chicago last month, Mrs. Dilling spent two hours exposing such “Reds” as Newton D. Baker, the late Jane Addams, Harold H. Swift (“the cream-puff type”), Louis D. Brandeis (“He contributes $100 a year to a filthy little Communist college down in Arkansas”). Then a little man in the rear of the committee-room whispered to his neighbor that the witness ought to be named Mrs. Dillinger instead of Mrs. Dilling. The neighbor, who happened to be Husband Albert Wallwick Dilling, promptly uprose and smashed the little man’s jaw. The hearing adjourned in an uproar.

Last week the Senate committee, which shortly called off its investigation in disgust, cleared University of Chicago of all charges, recommending only that famed, liberal English Professor Robert Morss Lovett be dismissed as “not loyal to the spirit or letter of the constitution of Illinois or the U. S.”—ED.

Liberian Restoration

Sirs:

For 18 years I have been president of the American Colonization Society which in 1847 deeded as a free gift to Liberia the entire territory now occupied by that Republic. Consequently, I had more than a perfunctory interest in the recent comment on the Liberian situation (TIME, June 24). Your article contains many undeniable facts but there are some statements that are more picturesque than accurate. For instance, there may be a million rats in Monrovia but I have been there twice and I can only say that I never saw one. Again, you state that the Liberian Government has “never succeeded in controlling the million or more Afro-Africans who inhabit Liberia’s 43,000 square miles of equatorial jungle.” On the contrary, the natives, with the exception of the independent and frequently turbulent Krus, are remarkably peaceful and even in the case of the Krus there is more than a suspicion that their uprising has been inspired by outside agitators with ulterior motives. Pedestrian strangers are safe everywhere and there have been no revolutionary movements such as we constantly witness in the South American so-called republics. Certainly there has never been such a dark and bloody chapter as is recorded by our American Indians, with torturings, murderings and scalpings. Neither is it a month’s journey to Liberia, for by sailing on the Italian Line and transferring at Gibraltar, Monrovia can be reached in 14 days. Health conditions have greatly improved and I heard and saw nothing of bubonic plague or yellow fever. For a month I lived opposite the Executive Mansion and I saw none of the tin cans you so vividly describe.

I admit that there are many things in Liberia that demand improvement—that Monrovia is still primitive without a water supply, sewage disposal, pavements or telephones, and that the few and dim electric lights only emphasize the darkness of the tropic night. I had no sympathy with, and in fact publicly criticized, the action of Liberia in regard to a just debt but that matter has now been straightened out. It is also true that there is but one semblance of a road in the Republic, outside the Firestone plantation, but the Government is now building a thoroughfare through the interior to the French border and another road parallel with the coast to the southeastern boundary.

The main point, however, is that the U. S. Government, by its recent formal recognition of Liberia, thus resuming the diplomatic relations which were so unfortunately interrupted five years ago, has insured a complete restoration of the era of good feeling between the U. S. and Liberia which had existed for nearly a century. I believe that this action will contribute immeasurably to the future development and progress of a nation which needs and deserves encouragement. More than this, it will tend to preserve the sovereignty of Liberia against the cupidity of foreign nations which would like nothing better than the flimsiest excuse to treat Liberia as Japan is acting toward China and Italy toward Abyssinia.

HENRY LITCHFIELD WEST

Washington, D. C.

To Henry Litchfield West, 75, oldtime Washington newsman, president of the Gridiron Club (1900), onetime Commissioner of the District of Columbia, all thanks for readable footnotes on Liberia. —F.D.

He-Man’s Tobacco

Sirs:

… In your article [TIME, June 17], “Rear Row Voice” on Senator Brown from New Hampshire you made an error. Five Brothers is a long cut and not a plug tobacco. The dirt movers commissary that built the railroads of the last three or four decades carried Five Brothers. The lumber camp commissaries and boarding places and stores that furnished the railroad construction and operation, carried F. Adams Peerless tobacco. Of course Paul Bunyan of logging fame chewed Peerless and spit against the wind. Some of us that came up the pioneer route hated to acknowledge to ourselves in later life that we were not vigorous enough to use Peerless. It is a real he-man that uses Five Brothers or Peerless and it is well to know that the august lot of Senators contain some men that use a real man’s tobacco.

R. P. COOK

Park Ridge, Ill.

Sirs:

Evidently TIME’s editor spent all his college days in the classroom and none on the baseball field, when TIME, June 17, states that New Hampshire’s Brown chews two 2O¢ plugs of Five Brothers a day. Since when did this brand assume this form? . . .

ROBERT E. GROVE

Vice President

Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, Inc. Pittsburgh, Pa.

Sirs:

. . . Allow me to correct you. Five Brothers is a shredded pipe tobacco. Very strong to the average smoker and smeller. Very bitter to the chewer but also satisfactory to an unusual degree after once becoming accustomed to it.

I can readily understand the Senator’s long use of this brand of tobacco. It is for men only and they usually stick to it for their pipe or chew enjoyment.

WILLIAM J. BERGIN

St. Louis, Mo.

Let Readers Cook, Grove & Bergin study their tobacco facts. Five Brothers is produced in long cut and plug, to suit regional tastes. Often only one type is sold in one vicinity. New England is “plug country.”—ED.

Bi-Carb Lion

Sirs:

We dislike the word “belching”, used by Reader W. D. Humphrey in his letter about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s lion who emits the theme song of their “flickers” (TIME, June 24)—but my family always has called that particular lion by the name of “Bi-Carb”—and rather affectionately!

E. R. STREMPEL

Washington, D. C.

*President Hutchins is on the Moscow Summer School Advisory Board, part of the Institute of International Education under whose auspices U. S. students attend many a foreign summer session.—ED.