Tough Guy?
Sirs:
. . . What possessed you to write that Roosevelt article and all that guff about the "tough guy" [TIME, June 10] ? Why not give the name of the author of that effusion? Maybe it would turn out to be Charlie Michelson or another New Deal pressman.
But if you're telling us to get behind the President during the next 33 weeks, O. K. Most of us agree we need a leader who can lead and who is a "tough guy." But that doesn't mean we're tossing in the sponge for he elections. You know, there are some other "tough guys" in this country, too.
CHARLES T. FARROW JR.
Westfield, N. J.
>TIME makes no apology for presenting the picture of Franklin Roosevelt seen by his friends as well as that seen by his opponents. (The man quoted, one of the New Deal's most prominent officials, could not be named since he gave his personal view off the record.) Far from suggesting that the U. S. in effect call off the 1940 election, TIME is totally unimpressed with the cliche, "Don't swap horses in midstream." Citizens should ponder well who will make them the best President for 1941-45. For four years after election, the U. S.--unlike England, which got rid of Chamberlain--won't be able to swap horses no matter how bad the going gets.--ED.
Sanity in Art
Sirs:
In these dark days it is good of the Society for Sanity in Art to give us something to laugh about [TIME, June 3]. You did not mention that the members of the Boston Society were so pressed to find masters of "sane" art that they were forced to borrow from the ranks of the "insane." They took not only Monet, denounced by their 19th-Century counterparts as "barbarian, quack and incompetent," but even lacovleff, who, during the last years of his life, was so "insane" as to paint in the modern manner.
O, Sanity, where is thy sting?
ELINOR GOODRIDGE
Boston, Mass.
Sirs:
F. W. Coburn, sometime art critic of the Boston Herald, doesn't care a damn what anybody quotes or doesn't quote from his tripe of many years ago, but, by God, the cur who wrote and the editor who passed the gratuitous insult to Miss Margaret Browne in your issue of June 3 both deserve to have their ugly mugs punched--it could happen, too.
F. W. COBURN
President
Lowell Historical Society
Boston, Mass.
War Sentiment
> TIME'S report (June 3) that isolationist and pacifist letters from readers had suddenly disappeared from its mail, promptly brought back a quota of notes from isolationists voting "Still present!" as well as more letters from anti-isolationists voting "Thumbs down!" Herewith examples of each:
Sirs:
The editor's remark in the current issue of the magazine that TIME'S correspondents, almost to a man, favor intervention in the European war roused my determination that TIME should hear from at least one person who does not share these views. . . .
ROBERT W. COPE
Westtown, Pa.
Sirs:
. . .Youth was the first to follow Fascism in Europe; it may be the last to swallow the empty wind of those who howl for American participation in war. While there's peace, there's hope.
RUTH FIRESTONE ('41)
Vassar College Poughkeepsie, N. Y.
Sirs:
The apparent majority opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, it is a fact that an isolationist may have ideals too. However . . . in the name of Democracy, let's make the Isolationists junk them and join the loudest camp. . .
CHARLES G. SONNEN Little Rock, Ark.
Sirs:
. . . At least one of your subscribers does not sanction the militaristic forces which again look toward Europe either longingly or aghast. . .
EARL C. SAUERHAMMER
Catonsville, Md.
Sirs:
In order to keep down the damned lopsidedness of your incoming mail I'm contributing my bit to the stack of isolationist and pacifist letters that you will surely receive. . . . If this is the only letter you receive to chalk up on the calm side of your War Score Board, I'll have to start thinking about that two-by-four island in the Caribbean again. . .
BOB HANSON West Los Angeles, Calif.
Sirs:
In order that pacifist letters may not disappear entirely from your mail, and blind your magazine further to the fact that some still want peace, we send you this letter. . .
JOHN T. BAIR CECIL M. STEWART WILLIAM RAY THRASHER
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
Sirs:
. . . Last Sunday morning in the First Presbyterian Church of Columbus, Ohio, I preached a sermon from two texts: Lincoln's "With malice toward none" and Christ's "Love your enemy and pray for them that persecute you." . . .To my amazement I have never had a congregation respond with so many who have earnestly gripped my hand and said, "How we have waited for someone to say just that." . . .
MARSHAL LOGAN SCOTT
Minister
The First Presbyterian Church
Columbus, Ohio
Sirs:
Last evening I was sitting outdoors shelling peas, looking over the hedge into my neighbor's garden of prize roses when an Army plane roared overhead and I thought, I wonder what it would look like around here if that pilot planted a bomb right in the middle of that garden. . . Such thoughts are my constant companion and I feel sure that I am like wives and mothers all over the nation. Why is it, we wonder, that we are allowed to continue to go about the homely tasks: cooking the cereal, wiping the baby's nose, cleaning the bathtub, when our sisters in other places have lost their homes, very possibly their babies, and have no cereal to cook? By what peculiar virtue of our own is it that our men can come home at night to their comforts, to their hobbies, pipes and newspapers when their brothers in other places are fighting desperately for the right to enjoy these simple privileges. . .
I should like to add the voice of the housewife to the growing chorus of your readers who are demanding that we help the Allies in their death struggle. . .
ROSA HOPSON
Mobile, Ala.
Sirs:
Flatly to be rejected, because resting on nightmarish statistical procedure, is your claim to having discovered war sentiment. .. .
GEORGE W. ZINKE Instructor of Statistics Occidental College Los Angeles, Calif.
> Let Reader Zinke not jump to nightmarish conclusions. TIME'S only statistical procedure was to read its mail and report the obvious fact, that there had been a sharp apparent change in reader opinion.--ED.
Sirs: ... I did my bit in the last war. I had a year in France with the First Aero Squadron, A. E. F. My son is now approaching military age, as is the son of my brother. And when I say "to hell with the risk!--the time to do something is now," I am not actuated by a "nothing-to-lose" situation.
Seventeen of my squadron mates sleep the long sleep in France.
God forbid that they should awaken to see the crack-up in the moral fibre of their fellow citizens--the "not-our-war" people, the "what-can-we-do-anyway" people, the "scurry-to-cover" people! Yes, "anything short of war," and if that "anything" brings war, then let us show that cowardice is not the predominant trait of our nation! . . .
RALPH E. DE CASTRO (Distinguished Service Cross) ex-1st Lieut., 1st Aero Squadron A. E. F.
New York City
Sirs: . . . Could it be that, for one minute, our business and governmental executives believe that we young men could ever hold our heads erect again in the presence of English or French youth were they to fight our battle and sacrifice the lives of their brethren in order that the Allies may dictate peace terms favorable to America as well as to themselves, all while we are enjoying a war boom here, with freedom to swim, hike, enjoy many sports, as contrasted to the horrors of the battlefields across the ocean? . . .
STANLEY P. HARBISON Schenectady, N. Y.
Sirs:
If the Allies win this war, we can continue to drift along safely on our blissful policy of complete isolationism. If, on the other hand, the Allies lose, our security against the aggressor will no longer lie with the British Navy and the French Army, but only with a greater U. S. armament program than we ever have known before. The Allies are fighting our war. If we allow' them to lose, we will face the dictators alone. . . .
HENRY C. FOSTER
Spring Valley, Calif.
Sirs: . . . Why kid ourselves further? . . . This is our fight as much as it is that of England and France. Sooner or later we must go to their aid with ships, men and materiel--why not immediately? . . .
CLARKE PAINTER
Los Angeles, Calif.
Sirs:
As an American of military age whose college years were spent in the heyday of pacifism at any price, I can fully appreciate the fact that here in America we do face a crisis.
Like the rest of my generation I fell under the sway of that "splendid isolationism" that bred a distrust of capitalistic wars and patriotic oratory. Fortunately, I have had my eyes opened. . . .
Whatever the philosophical justification for the extreme pacifism which found such fertile soil in post-war disillusion, the fact is that its effects are undermining the very thing it purported to preserve: the democratic way of life. Wherever I mix with those of my own age I encounter that provincial blindness, apathy if you will, which blithely believes that though the whole world is dominated by brute force and the civilized community of nations destroyed, America ("They have to come across the ocean, don't they.") will go merrily on with freedom and opportunity for all. . . .
Unfortunately the more articulate college students are either Communist-minded or are influenced by Communistically inclined professors. (I don't say this in any Red-baiting sense. I am well aware of the temptation to condemn any liberal movement as Communistic. But this thing is a fact--I once attended a meeting of representatives from all Pacific Coast colleges, for example, where it was solemnly proposed that we should work to dissolve the Boy Scouts as they engendered the militaristic spirit!) . . .
Now the journalistic and forensic preachings of this element play right into the frame of mind of the vast majority of other young men and women who are not Communists but "who have been raised in homes (at least in the West) where any conception of foreign policy that exists has been determined by the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and finds expression in parrotlike repetitions of Washington's "no foreign entanglements" statement. The result of this unwitting partnership between half-cocked idealists and the sage of San Simeon is a young generation with about as much sense of world responsibility as a tribe of aborigines in the Australian bush. ...
NOEL SHERRY
Berkeley, Calif.
Sirs:
. . . The lack of moral responsibility of the U. S. A. is appalling. They could have saved the world by merely warning the belligerents (namely Germany) against attacking small neutral States; up to the moment I am writing, a mere word can save France from being stabbed in the back by Italy, but there is no hope the U. S. A. will say it, because it is all right that many Americans be killed per year playing football, but not one American life must be endangered for the cause of justice, freedom and Christianism. . . .
ED. LOPEZ DE ROMAN A JR.
Grandson of a late President of Peru
Arequipa, Peru
> Senor Lopez de Romana is mistaken. No word has yet stopped either Hitler or Mussolini. -- ED.
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