Cover Men

Sirs:

Your cover picture of SEC's Joseph P. Kennedy (TIME, July 22) started a discussion as to whether or not he is the first person to appear there a second time.

Did he not also appear there at the time of SEC's inception, and is not Franklin D. Roosevelt the only other man to be so honored?

ROBERT E. HICKEY

Harvard Club Boston, Mass.

SEC's Joseph P. Kennedy made his first appearance on TIME's cover July 22, 1935. TIME's only rule in selection of cover subjects is newsworthiness. Thus, George V and Stanley Baldwin have in twelve years each appeared five times. Four-timers are Franklin D. Roosevelt, James Ramsay MacDonald. Typical of the 15 three-timers are Pope Pius XI, General Chiang Kaishek. Two-timers number 56, include Adolph Hitler. Mussolini, Carter Glass, Huey Long, Helen Wills.--ED.

Lamb Chop's Identity

Sirs:

. . . The scribe who pounds out the ironic, smile-provoking reviews of the celluloid strips tripped a bit in his discussion of that stupendous inanity billed as She [TIME, July 22]. I fidgeted through one showing of this insult to my imagination, but was attentive enough to notice that the gentleman preserved in ice "like a lamb chop in aspic'' was not John Vincey, but his valiant servant who had had a terrific encounter with a sabre-toothed monster. John Vincey, on the other hand, was miraculously preserved on a very uncomfortable looking slab, only to be unceremoniously consumed by a powerful potion poured over him by She, herself, when Leo Vincey appears to be a reincarnation of his ill-fated ancestor. . . .

DAVID H. BOYD

Washington, Pa.

Sirs:

. . . If the person who wrote up She in your July 22 number attended a showing of the picture he certainly must have slept from about the 3rd inning to the 8th, and then asked some child what had happened. . . .

GIL RICHARDS

St. Louis, Mo.

Sirs:

I agree with your cinema critic that She is a very mediocre spectacle. But evidently the poor dear could not sit through the picture without an occasional cat nap. . . .

MARTHA WINSTON FANE

Louisville, Ky.

To TIME'S cinema critic, a thoroughgoing rebuke for writing "John Vincey's body," instead of "John Vincey's body servant."--ED.

Liberal

Sirs:

TIME'S article, July 22, "Ouster Aftermath," about my being "dissatisfied with the disrespectful treatment'' of instructors of Omaha Municipal University toward private ownership of public utilities is absolutely erroneous. Whether the professors were for or against private ownership never came to my notice. In the years of my connection as regent of Municipal University or its predecessor I never discussed with a member of faculty or student body or regents any public utility subject except in one instance, when I approved before all nine members of Board of Regents the subject of the Tennessee Valley Authority-housing program being discussed in a class where the general subject of housing was being studied. This action on my part was made necessary because one recent now resigned disapproved discussion of a TV A subject in a university class. I respectfully ask correction of your misstatement.

JAMES E. DAVIDSON

President

Nebraska Power Co. Omaha, Neb.

Frosted Feet

Sirs:

Under the heading, "Crime, Price of Progress" in TIME, July 22, you record the story of two Negroes with frosted feet. There is the usual lack of insight in this story and the usual appeal to sentiment for the poor abused criminal. Both courts and publicists seem to have entirely overlooked the true philosophy and the correct attitude towards this class of criminal. To begin with, causation: I have had under my care in the past year three of these Negro types. All had frosted toes. This condition depending not on exposure so much as on the syphilitic disease of the blood vessels which brings about the gangrenous disease. One of them was paretic enough to attempt suicide by throwing himself out of a window and at 45 is a bedridden pauper at the expense of the tax payer, an incurable brain syphilitic. The second had also frosted toes. He died of his gangrene and associated syphilis and never was near a chain gang. The third had frosted toes and is still running around the world with them.

It is my thought, that the people who have neither acquired syphilis nor inherited brains which are decayed by this disease are the important individuals to be protected from the damage of this "rust on the wheat."

I do not believe that such mawkish sentimentality and lack of knowledge as expressed in this editorial comment is of any value to the nation. These Negroes are of a type that are better off "never born." They stand as "nuisance criminals or feeble-minded paupers in the body-politic. . . ."

FRANKLIN H. CHURCH, M. D.

Chief Clinician

Salem Co., State Department Clinics Salem, N. J.

On trial for criminal cruelty, the superintendent, guard and physician of the North Carolina convict camp in which

Negroes Barnes & Shropshire lost their feet were last week found not guilty, but lost their jobs.--ED.

Nine P's Sirs:

TIME, July 22, under France--"Population v. 'Poetess'," displaying the picture of Joan Warner, "Slave Dancer," sans fan, brassiere or pants, petite but well shackled, holds up your seemingly established principle: no fear for the nine P's of the press--public ipinion, president, pope, potentate, priest, preacher, police, prince, or pauper. . . .

T. RYAN BLOCK

Gridley, Calif.

Bewilderment

Sirs:

Thank you for the laugh on M. Boverat v. Miss Warner. I was very much puzzled as to why the National Alliance for Increasing the Population of France should be so upset by nude dancing. M. Boverat's statement that "women after beholding such indecency, don't want to have children," increased my bewilderment. How does he know?

MARGARET RIDGWAY

Niagara Falls, N. Y.

Mercurochrome & Iodine Sirs:

TIME, in its synopsis of medicine (July 22), did not take time to explain fully the A. M. A. Journal's article on mercurochrome. Readers are likely to be left with the impression that the red dye has been shown to be more efficacious than tincture of iodine as an antiseptic. You fail to state that when drug-buyers ask for mercurochrome, they are not getting the tincture, which Miss Hill described as being more bacteriostatic than a 7% tincture of iodine. They are handed instead a 2% aqueous solution, since few places outside of institutions carry the tincture. Miss Hill's researches found that the aqueous solution of mercurochrome is less potent than tincture of iodine. The reason why the aqueous solution is so generally sold is, of course, that people prefer it to the smarting tincture; and in their desire for painlessness, they choose something less efficacious.

You also state that Miss Hill's researches ''quieted the suspicions' of mercurochrome's usefulness. A reading of the editorial in the same issue of the A. M. A. Journal might have convinced you otherwise. That, which is in the nature of a survey of the clinical literature on the subject, indicates that other experimentations have been definitely less favorable towards mercurochrome's value, and that Miss Hill's procedure was not flawless. . . .

MORRIS FORER

Registered Pharmacist

Trenton, N. J.

"That's Wonderful"

Sirs:

Your science editor would have really distinguished himself from the herd in reporting quake-quack Greenspan (TIME, July 22) if he had footnoted somewhat as follows:

''The world average for earthquake occurrence has long been known to be at least one per hour; there are sound reasons for suspecting that it may exceed one per minute. A shock such as the one which destroyed Quetta, India, is inevitably followed by aftershocks which may number thousands within a month or more."

Unless genius Greenspan, or others of these perennial prophets, will name the exact place and time more definitely than 16 million square miles of the world's most active earthquake belt some day next week (cf. "in islands northeast of Australia," July 11 & 12), the entry should be scratched. And I fail to see how even juicy journalism can construe as fulfillment of such a futile forecast a volcanic eruption at Krakatoa, or a quake in Japan. "Gosh, that's wonderful."

L. D. LEET

Seismologist Oak Ridge Observatory Harvard, Mass.

Prophecy

Sirs:

Would that TIME's able newsstaff could for one issue become prophets and print a page from world history 50 or 100 years hence. As it is we can but imagine that such a page might read: "In the fall of 1935. Dictator Mussolini opened war against Ethiopia after announcing plans for Italy's Glorification and the Re-creation of the Roman Empire. Peace might have been preserved under England's leadership had the U. S. aided with its good offices. However, lack of diplomatic leadership and no strong foreign policy forced the American nation to repudiate its pet treaty--the Briand-Kellogg Pact--and weakly cite the League of Nations which the U. S. had never recognized."

Certainly we can hope for no higher rating than a funky nation after announcing that we would be ". . . loath to believe that, either of them would resort to other than pacific means as a method of dealing with this controversy. . . ." then advising our citizens in Ethiopia to leave that country.

Certainly our country can ill-afford to have foreign nations involved in a war, especially a conflict which with little provocation might develop into another international struggle with disrupting and demoralizing effects to our commerce. There are those who would have us believe the U. S. to be a self-sufficient nation. On the contrary, intelligent persons know that to be prosperous our merchants, manufacturers and growers must export at least 10% of their products. In turn, we must import rubber, spices, alloy minerals, yute and countless necessities of which we produce little or none within our 48 States.

God forbid that our boys in khaki will ever again be forced to go into action 3,000 miles from home. But would not diplomatic encouragement to Haile Selassie cause Il Duce to slow up a bit and realize that reason is more useful than the sword? A nation can always be boycotted into submission with less bloodshed and less cost than a war.

WARREN THURBER

Albion, N. Y.

Arms & Shoes

Sirs:

According to the TIME-FORTUNE theory of war I presume the present Italo-Ethiopian tea party [TIME, Dec. 24 et scq.] is being fomented by:

1) Italy's No. 1 munitions maker Mussolini in order that he may sell arms to himself, or 2) the shoe tycoons of Ethiopia who perspicaciously realize that one dose of Italian foot-scorching gas will send the entire Ethiopian army rushing to the shoe stores. . . .

HOWARD POWEL

Taylorville, Ill.

Author Business

Sirs:

I want to thank somebody up there for giving me a swell break on my book, They Died With Their Boots On (TIME. July 29).

Being new at the author business I don't know just what to say. I'm breathless--it is something beyond my fondest hope.

Somehow I feel that I have been repaid for the four times I rewrote the book before submitting it to a publisher; I feel that the 14-day grind from 6 a. m. to midnight when I completely revised it was worth the effort.

THOMAS RIPLEY

Atlanta, Ga.

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