Safe & Sane Credit

Sirs: TIME'S comment on the "staggering blow" given to the Fourth of July slaughter, (TIME, July 7) has made me mad all over. This is the first I have heard that it was [Edward W. J. Bok who had given the "staggering blow"; as I recall it the Ladies' Home Journal did very little, at least there were other periodicals did more. The Chicago Tribune deserves some credit, certainly more than the Ladies' Home Journal, but has claimed, and had given it, more than the facts warrant. All it did was to publish on the 5th and 6th all it could get at the time; it was stale news after that. The fact is The Journal of the American Medical Association deserves all the credit for giving the "staggering blow" to the insane method of celebrating independence. It attacked the problem in the only scientific way. It waited the necessary time to get the end results; the number of deaths, especially from lockjaw which only time would get, the resulting blindness, the major and incapacitating bodily injuries, and so on. These were obtained by press clippings, but supplemented and verified by doctors and hospitals. Then, after publishing these data systematic propaganda was carried on, year alter year, by reprints to the press, to mayors of important cities, to health officers, etc.

After three or four years there was such an interest created that, as each season came round, an increasing number of newspapers and periodicals were sending for the reports. It was this propaganda following the publication of the reports, that caused the formation of Sane Fourth organizations, which did so much in getting cities and towns to pass laws or ordinances doing away with fire works . . . GEORGE H. SIMMONS.*

South Dakota's McMaster

Sirs:

Enlightened by your pithy reports on other members of Congress, the undersigned readers of TIME request that you print one on Senator William H. McMaster of South Dakota, now a candidate to succeed himself.

FRANCIS A. CRONIN

ALMA G. AMISH

MRS. E. T. BUNTING

E. D. JULIUS

H. D. SCHULTZ

Revillo, S. Dak.

The record of Senator William Henry ("Gasoline Mac") McMaster of South Dakota is as follows:

Born: at Ticonic, Iowa, May 10. 1877. Start ; life: newsboy in Sioux City, Iowa. Career: While selling papers he attended Sioux City public and high schools, went to Beloit College, Wis. (1899). In 1901 he moved to Yankton, S. Dak., became and remained small-town banker. In 1902 he married Harriet R. Reustle, whom he met at Beloit (children: William Henry Jr., Dorothy). Moderately wealthy, he turned to politics, got into the Legislature in 1911. He became State senator (1913-17), lieutenant-governor (1917-21), governor (1921-25).

While governor he earned his soubriquet by establishing State gasoline stations, waging a successful price-war with oil companies. He also floated a $2,000,000 bond issue to finance State cement-making; his plant still functions, redeems the bonds. In 1924 he was elected to the Senate. His term expires March 4, 1931. In Congress: He is the least odd but not the least effective of insurgent Republicans. He is eager to argue for his constituency's interests. often able to achieve legislation for them. His committees: Claims, Indian Affairs, Military Affairs, Post Offices & Post Roads, Public Buildings & Grounds.

He voted for: Farm Relief (1927, 1928, 1929), the Boulder Dam (1928), the Jones (greater Prohibition penalties) law (1929).

He voted against: Tax reduction (1926, 1930), the Navy's 15-cruiser bill (1929), Reapportionment (1929), the Tariff (1930).

He votes and drinks Dry.

His views on international affairs are usually an echo of those of Idaho's Senator William Edgar Borah, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Legislative hobbies: farm-relief and pacifism. In 1928 the Senate adopted his resolution calling for a reduction of industrial tariff rates which was the opening gun of the tariff battle. He once offered a bill to draft Government (Continued on p. 8) officials and Congressmen as front-line soldiers in time of war. In appearance he is slight, short (5 ft. 7 in.), dark-haired, partly bald. He dresses better than most other insurgents. He talks rapidly, sometimes bitterly, on the floor, debates well but without humor.

He is an Episcopalian. He smokes cigars and cigarets, does not swear. Outside Congress: In Washington, he lives with his wife in an apartment at No. 3220 Connecticut Ave., N. W., where his children pay frequent visits. He prefers family to social contacts. He drives his own Buick sedan to the Congressional Country Club for golf, attends baseball games. In Yankton he owns but leases his home, "lives around" when there. He is a Mason, Odd Fellow, Elk. Impartial Senate observers rate him thus: not an outstanding, but an ingenious legislator, not a smart leader but an able, trustworthy follower, an asset to the farm bloc. Opposed in the autumn elections by Democrat William John Bulow, onetime Governor of South Dakota, he depends for re-election largely on the Republican machine headed by his colleague Senator Peter Norbeck, in which he is unquestionably No. 2 man.--ED.

Mortison No Copycat

Sirs: . . . Lou Stone didn't spring into prominence because he sent a picture of a two-headed chick down here, and his best story was not about a buck deer with an inner tube around his neck. Stone wrote just one good animal story 25 years ago last spring. It was about a farmer who found a watch he had lost seven years before. He found it in the stomach of the old cow after he had killed her and cut her up. The watch was still going; the digestive muscles of the cow's stomach had kept it wound up. Oh yes, the watch had lost only a minute and a half.

That story was picked up and reprinted all over the country, and Lou Stone was the famous weird animal man of Winsted. He is a fine feller, I believe, although I never met him, but his stories are pretty punk--like Mortison's. Some of them are worse. He is copying himself, and not doing very well.

Mortison is not a young upstart country reporter, as your article would suggest. He is a newspaper artist. He went to work in the brass shops up there in Waterbury when he was a kid . . . and worked steadily until he was toolmaker when he was a middle-aged man. Then he felt the call of the wild and moved out to a little town called Prospect and became a chicken farmer. It wasn't altogether the call of the wild. He had to put his wife in a private sanitarium, and had to make more money somehow. Just for fun he became a country correspondent for the Waterbury Republican. You know, they send in a little stickful of who spent the day with whom, and who's shingling his barn. Mort is a humorous bird (despite his animal stories) and he appreciated the flavor of the humorous things that go on in a little town, and would have liked to write them up. But a country correspondent can't do that, so he invented Lester Green.

If one of the neighbors got himself in a ludicrous predicament, and would have been offended if he was written up, Mort wrote a story about Lester Green. Lester was always the goat, and the idea went over big. No one seemed to feel libeled, everyone knew who Lester was batting for and everybody chuckled.

Next Mortison became a cartoonist. I don't know how he did that, I. C. S., I guess, but he is good. The Republican hired him, and he does all the work for the morning, evening and Sun day paper. For quite a while he drove out after work and ran his farm too.

When that silly Marian Talley was touring around and cleaning up before she went back to the farm, she made Waterbury and gave out an interview in which she said she would like to retire with three chickens and a cow. Lester Green sent her the three chickens, express paid to the Metropolitan Opera House, and the A. P. picked up that story, which was Lester Green's start as a national character. And you would be surprised to see his mail now. The funniest thing about Lester Green is that the A. P. took him seriously for a long time. Sometimes they wired for "verification" of some damn preposterous story.

Mortison writes those stories because the city editor of the morning paper likes to have them to put in a box on the front page. No '"copycat" at all, you see.

Last winter I was on the staff of the Sunday Republican in Waterbury and had a desk next to Mortison. The Sunday Editor is one Bill Vosburgh. He is a Yale man, and reads his TIME faithfully. He is a fine boy, too, and has a sharp and humorous tongue. "Well, well, here's the old Copycat. Bill will greet Mortison for the next few weeks, and Mort will grin --he's always good-natured--but I have an idea that your story will really hurt his feelings a little. . . . BARRON C. WATSON

Port Washington, L. I.

Gondola Man

Sirs:

"Spend 'till it Hurts" in your ''Letters" of July 28 and one of the recent daily sermonettes of Calvin Coolidge, are not far apart in their general thought.

Is not the difficulty at the moment, the fact that the general public, not Mr. Coolidge, have done their spending and now it hurts? . . .

I am no pessimist and expect a perfectly natural improvement in business before the end of the year, but I feel like the alderman, who, confusing gondolas with rabbits, thought two gondolas were sufficient for the pond in the park. . . .

STUART W. WEBB

Pathe Exchange, Inc.

New York City.

Wanted: Adam Smith

Sirs: Mr. L. B. Roberts in TIME, July 28, advocates "spending until it hurts." Probably the present depression is more largely due to spending beyond our ability to pay and in response to high pressure sales methods than to any other cause. Also the violation of the old laws of political economy, the false theory of "spending creates prosperity," and borrowing against future probable earnings ($1 down and $1 per week) has not only exhausted savings but has mortgaged the future. . .

Instead of spending till it hurts let every man who did not readjust in 1920 balance his books, write off his losses, take bankruptcy if necessary, squeeze the water from his company and hold his employes in service until it hurts. (This last is especially applicable to the railroads.) With our feet again on solid ground we can begin to climb safely. We have had quite enough of mental suggestion and absent treatment--let us rather call in old Dr. Adam Smith.* JOHN E. FIELD

Denver, Colo.

*Editor and General Manager Emeritus of the A. M. A., at present in England. *British economist (1723-90) whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations discusses the principle of division of labor, based primarily on the propensity of human nature "to truck, barter or exchange one thing for another." Precedent to this division of labor is the accumulation of capital.

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