"Ironclad Evidence"
Sirs:
May I direct your attention to the brief article in the April 7 issue of TIME, which sets forth Harold L. Ickes' genealogical troubles. . . . You say that Mr. Ickes established after a "fourway check" that there is no Ickes coat of arms. I regret of course the necessity of contradicting that statement, but find it necessary to do so in the face of conclusive evidence to the contrary, which has, perhaps, escaped the attention of the Secretary. I have written him about this slight error. For your information I enclose letter (copy) from the International Heraldic Institute, an absolutely reputable firm who conducted my genealogical research for me. This letter sets forth conclusively the ironclad evidence and authenticity of the family coat of arms.
GORDON C. ICKES
Springfield, Ill.
> Despite the evidence supplied by Third Cousin Gordon Ickes, stubborn Harold remains unconvinced that the coat of arms (see cut] is his own. The International Heraldic Institute's letter to Gordon Ickes states that the name Ickes is found in ancient records under various forms--Icke, Ike, Icken, Iken, Ihk, Ihken, Itzken, Itken, Ickel, Ickels, Ickes--and that these are all to be found in Heintze-Cascorbi's Die Deutschen Familiennamen, Berlin, 1933. The upper half of the shield is silver with a gold crescent on the breast of the black "demi eagle." The lower half of the shield is red, the trefoils silver. The eagle sticking out its tongue denotes divine power, the crescent shows participation in crusades.--ED.
Suitable Target
Sirs:
Re cover, colored picture of Hitler: I'm eternally grateful to TIME for that beautiful picture.
At last I have found a suitable target for my dart game.
ALVIN KLEVS
Chicago, Ill.
Sirs:
I usually manage to "take things in my stride," but your cover picture of Hitler this week moves me to speak. TIME is very definitely my favorite magazine. However, with so many fine, decent and worth-while individuals to choose from, couldn't you find a more worthy subject . . . ?
My reaction to finding Herr Hitler on the cover of your outstanding magazine was similar to that pronounced feeling of distaste experienced once last summer when I stooped to admire a clump of lovely wild flowers--and gazed at the coiled mass of a rattler. . . .
HELEN BRYANS
Galen, Mont.
Sirs:
Boy, oh, boy--did you louse up your front page!
J. ROGOFF
New York City
Sirs:
PHOOEY.
CHARLES C. RUSSELL
Grand Rapids, Mich.
Sirs:
. . . O Tempus, O Morons--your faqade is pornographic--yea, scatological. . . .
FRED A. HALL
New York City
Sirs:
. . . Isn't it illegal to send obscene and indecent matter through the mail?
SIDNEY A. LEVY
Washington, D.C.
Sirs:
Unless your readers turn to page 28 in the April 14 issue they may not all see the significance of your cover with its photograph of the most cruel human being recorded in history. They might even suppose it to be a tribute to Hitler!
I wish the portrait might have been accompanied by two lines from the story entitled "Strategy," on page 28: "All the world as yet unconquered is united in distrust of him."
MARGARET DELAND
Boston, Mass.
Sirs:
In answer to all who may complain about seeing Hitler on the front cover of TIME, let me suggest they remove their rose-colored glasses, cotton from their ears and other obstacles in the way and face this fact: The Hitler menace can and well may become much more unpleasant to us in these United States than a picture on the cover of a magazine ! . . .
KATHRYNE ROHRS
Peru, Neb.
Sirs:
. . . There is one thing I will say for the picture--it is by far the most character-revealing of any that have come to my notice. . . .
F. C. RISING
Minnewaukan, N.D.
> That was TIME'S intention.--ED.
Line-Up
Sirs:
As I have been reading your accounts of each week's news, I have come to feel that the world struggle has now ranged the totalitarian countries and the democracies against each other so unmistakably that the line-up can be recognized by even the most bemused optimists. . . .
L. B. HANLEY
Madison, Wis.
Sirs:
The American people are being openly and shamelessly conditioned for war. Those who are shaping our interventionist policies are miles ahead of public opinion, and find it necessary to prod it from all sides with every conceivable trick of propaganda. As this is written, the people are still 80% against military involvement. Yet, buffeted by overbearing pressures, they are being pushed helplessly down the road to war like the leaves of last fall are hurried down the gutters by the freshets of this spring. . . .
PARKER PALMER
Tucson, Ariz.
Sirs:
Britain's shipping losses are becoming daily more alarming. Obviously, something must be done about it--and quickly. While we are wasting precious hours bickering about the use of American convoys for supplies to Britain, Hitler is overrunning a few more innocent democracies.
Since we have committed ourselves to the task of aiding Britain, we must fulfill our obligation. Churchill said: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." It is important to furnish those tools, but it is even more important to deliver them where they are needed. It now becomes apparent that the only way this can be done is by using American convoys. . . .
MARCELLE RADGESKY
New York City
Long-time Itch
Sirs:
Let not TIME'S readers be fooled into thinking that all University of Michigan students agree with Robert O. Schulze (TIME'S Letters, April 14) when he says that Henry Ford has "done this country more good than all the unions, Perkinses and Wagners can ever hope to accomplish."
Freshman Schulze's charge wouldn't line up, for instance, with the position of the Michigan Daily, the liberal student paper, which has long championed the progressive New Deal legislation.
Furthermore, what makes Bob think that TIME'S story was pro-Ford? True, it was "clear and comprehensive," but even then it certainly wasn't antiunion, or anti-Wagner. Indeed, even to a Dearbornite, it gave a lot of dope we've been itching to know about for a long time. The diagram of Ford holdings, for instance, was an illuminating one.
ROBERT COPP, '42
University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Mich.
Paraphrase
Sirs:
You publish in your April 14 issue a disturbingly eloquent letter from Robert F. Kemper [contrasting the monetary sacrifices made by many Army trainees with the wage increases demanded by defense strikers].
The overshadowing fact is that it isn't the Democratic Party that now controls our Government, as we thought when Mr. Roosevelt was first elected. Neither is it the New Deal Party into which this was supposed to be metamorphosed. The control is Socialist-Labor. The title is the only one which fits.
The party in power might well paraphrase Commodore Stephen Decatur's classic utterance and say: "Organized Labor! May it ever be right, but Organized Labor, right or wrong." . . .
ROSCOE PEACOCK President
The Moore-Cottrell Subscription Agencies North Cohocton, N.Y.
Sirs:
I am in the Army; have been since November. I have very little time for reading, but I manage to digest TIME each week. In reading the April 14 issue, I ran across a very interesting letter from Reader Kemper.
I have discussed this letter with several men in this Special Weapons Troop. We are all in agreement with Kemper. However, there is some difference in our outlook. . . .
Kemper says, "We haven't got the answer. . . ." I think the men of this regiment have-an answer: When, and if, the Army is used to break these strikes, we are each and every one hoping that the first regiment to be called for domestic-disturbance duty will be the 112th Cavalry. . . .
WILLIAM F. MILLER Special Weapons Troop 112th
Cavalry Fort Clark, Tex.
Sirs:
Robert F. Kemper's "thousands of fellows like me" strikes me as very shallow thinking. A lot of fellows like him offering to work for nothing, or taking sides favoring the owners of concentrated wealth, who unlawfully refuse to bargain collectively as against the real workers who earn their bread by the sweat of their honest toil did not and never will break any depression or save our democratic country from Nazi control at home by concentrated wealth. . . .
C. L. BURKE
Ismay, Mont.
Ganging Up
Sirs:
The picture in the April 14 issue of TIME showing eight labor mad dogs beating one worker must have stirred the blood of every person who saw it. The wielder of what appears to be an iron rod [it was a child's baseball bat--ED.] seems to be aiming for the victim's spinal column with a blow backed by all his strength. . . .
Of course sympathizers will bleat their Communist-taught singsong about "labor-haters" in order to keep Labor's "sacred cow" status but they're overplaying their hands now and the public will back the corrective measures. . . .
RAY SHERMAN
Chicago, Ill.
Sirs:
It would give me great momentary satisfaction to hit a particular person I know over the head with a lead pipe.
Of course I'll never do it on account of (a) I make an effort, at least, to behave like a civilized human being, and (b) if I didn't,I'd be arrested for disorderly conduct and an attempt to do great bodily harm and I'd be thrown in jail.
I have just seen the pictures of violence at River Rouge, TIME, April 14. Are there two sets of laws in this country--one for LABOR--the other for little people like me?
M. K. PAGE
Madison, Wis.
Oscar
Sirs:
Your note about Oscar the seal in the Miscellany column [TIME, April 7] was not completely correct. I know as I met Captain Knowles very recently on a trip to Havana. He had owned Oscar ten years ago when the seal was only a few months old. One day a neighbor allowed Oscar to escape from his pen in the Captain's garden and until a few months ago no more was seen of him.
When the seal was caught this year and sold to the aquarium Captain Knowles immediately went to see it and recognized it as his erstwhile pet by a broken left flipper. Oscar, who would not let anyone approach him, recognized the captain, followed him about and responded to his calls.
About March 20 Oscar scaled a wall and escaped from the aquarium, only to turn up the next day to beg for fish from a fisherman in the port.
Naturally Captain Knowles hopes to keep his pet out of the aquarium and I hope he wins the fight.
EVELYN OLIVE HOE New York City
Cheap Stunt
Sirs:
. . . David Levinson and Robert Minor were never kidnapped or beaten in New Mexico [TIME, April 7]. They kidnapped themselves, with the help of New Mexico Communists, as a cheap publicity stunt and did such a crude job as to make themselves ridiculous instead of Communist heroes.
At the time of the Gallup riot and this alleged kidnapping, I was in charge of the whole investigation. . . .
DETECTIVE WILLIAM MARTIN
Santa Fe, N. Mex.
-- Robert Minor, who recently succeeded jailed Earl Browder as head man of U.S. Communists, obtained considerable notoriety in 1935 with his story of being kidnapped and beaten in New Mexico, whither he had journeyed to fight for ten miners accused of murdering a sheriff. Detective Martin reported to the Governor and Chief of State Police as follows: "After having made a thorough investigation of the alleged kidnapping . . . and after having taken long statements from 3 7 witnesses and going over the grounds . . . it is our firm belief that this . . . case is . . . a fraud and hoax perpetrated upon the Governor, the officials and the people of the State of New Mexico. . . ."--ED.
Bad Debt Department
Sirs:
ENCLOSED WESTERN UNION MONEY ORDER FOR TWENTY CENTS. PLEASE FORWARD SAME TO MATUD ODEHNAL IN PAYMENT OF THE TWENTY CENTS HE SAYS HE LOANED HITLER [TIME, April 21]. AS AN AMERICAN (OF IRISH DESCENT) I BELIEVE WE SHOULD LIVE UP TO OUR NEUTRALITY. THEREFORE THE PAYMENT OF THIS DEBT WILL OFFSET THE SEVEN BILLION WE GAVE ENGLAND.
FRANK WALSH
Morro Bay, Calif.
> To Farmer Matud Odehnal of Brownsville, Ore., a onetime Moravian stonemason who says he lent Hitler a krone in Pohrlitz and never saw it again, TIME has forwarded Reader Walsh's 20-c-. Would Mr. Walsh also like to repay some of Hitler's "borrowings" from Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium or France?--ED.
Suggestion
Sirs:
May I make a suggestion? In your future references to it, I think you should call it the New Ordure.
KERMIT KAHN
New York City
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.