Hardness & Peace
Sirs:
No ascetic, I!
I relish, with my fellow Americans, peace's minor blessings . . . pleasure driving, prospects of T-bones and Nylons.
But my New England conscience squeaks! Are we removing wartime restrictions too fast? Are we going to wallow in plenty, while the rest of mankind eats grass? If so, we might as well prepare atomic bomb-sights for World War III.
Perhaps our leaders do not trust us plain people enough. Can it be we want to be more vigilant, more self-sacrificing, than they dare ask? Do they mistake groans and grumbles from a soft and noisy minority for a real revolt of the people against rationing and wartime controls? What do they fear? Tumbrils?
We would rather go a little shabby, a little less daintily fed, than divide the world into haves and havenots. We ask for hardness, if it means our children's peace.
MRS. MARION W. ALLEN
Springfield, Ill.
Sirs:
... If we in the U.S. do not stop our reconversion to self-satisfaction, we shall lose the peace as we did after World War I. We must be willing to accept our moral responsibilities. We must feed the bodies of Europe's people or we shall never be able to feed their minds. We of the U.S. have lost our moral guts, and, unless we implement our intentions with actions, our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters have died in vain. In another future we will say, "God, help us," and we will forget to say, "For we helped ourselves." We are our brother's keeper, we can afford to be our brother's keeper, we must be our brother's keeper. . . .
AUSTIN P. ORDWAY
Battle Creek, Mich.
Ignorant Misunderstanding
Sirs:
The following is an excerpt from a letter , me by my former Harvard roommate, Pfc. M. Donald Coleman:
'. . . The people here are Burgundians, beautiful, proud, strong, and quite contemptuous of the ignorant American soldier who is of the opinion that every French girl is a harlot and should be treated as such. . . . We have completely misunderstood French morals and mores and they ours. We Americans are essentially Puritans (with the connotations that term had in the '20s, that is), so completely self-righteous and yet so evil-minded, as exemplified by our running amok with all sorts of excesses when we are confronted with the essentially honest French mores. There is a great surge of opinion in the Army which is growing daily and is terribly dangerous, a hatred and contempt for our Allies, the French ('they're dirty; they'd rob ya blind') and an admiration of the Germans, coming from the superficial similarities between life in two modern industrial countries where work is a virtue and pleasure a vice. Frankly I'm very much worried about it; its potential danger in the postwar world cannot be underestimated. . . ."
ALBERT S. COOK
New York City
Pierrette of Val D'Or
Sirs:
In your story about Pierrette Regimbal in TIME [Aug. 27] you have given us (belatedly, but still ahead of the rest of the field, as usual) our first intelligence of what may ultimately prove to have been something about as obscure and unimportant to the world of practical things as the first fantastic puttering around with atomic power. In 1858, when miracles began to be reported at Lourdes, psychology and medicine were little better prepared to investigate and establish the facts accurately than they were in the time of Jeanne d'Arc. If Pierrette is really comparable to Bernadette, then science has an opportunity compared to which a total eclipse of the sun is commonplace -- or else religion has the prospect of another Lourdes. . . .
Bernadette was a child of an unemployed French laborer in a family of four that would have been larger had not several of the children died early. Pierrette's father, you say, is a clerk, but, with twelve children, he probably has not much more to spend on each one of them than Francois Soubirous had for each of his four. So both children were definitely underprivileged at the time they first saw their visions. . . .
I hope TIME will be the first news magazine to publish a good picture of Pierrette. I would like very much to see whether the chain of similarities extends so far as to give her the stubborn mouth and straight black eyebrows and great, candid eyes of Bernadette.
(PFC.) LEW CUNNINGHAM
Portland, Ore.
P: Let Reader Cunningham judge for himself. TIME'S correspondent has visited the uncompleted shrine near Val D'Or, found it busy. The shrine's spring of "holy water" did not suddenly gush forth; it has always been there. Pierrette's most highly regarded "miracle"--restoring speech to the mute son, aged seven, of a local truck driver--is questionable. He was never mute, does not yet talk spontaneously --just repeats words. Says TIME'S correspondent: "The inhabitants of this thriving pioneer mining town [TIME, Sept. 24] now are wondering about a different kind of future: is Val D'Or to be another Lourdes?"--ED.
Surplus Property?
Sirs:
One of the assets which the Government has created during the war is a group of publishing properties. These include Army publications such as Yank, Stars & Stripes, and overseas publications of the Office of War Information such as Victory.
Are these valuable properties, with their top-ranking editorial organizations, their huge circulations and their prestige, to be abandoned? Ought there not be some way to continue these properties in the public interest and to salvage for the taxpayers some part of the investment they represent?
Might not Yank, for example, be continued as a permanent publication for the regular Armed Forces? Or might it become the organ of the Veterans Administration ? . . .
Overseas, Stars & Stripes (Mediterranean), which has had considerable distribution among English-reading civilians in North Africa. Italy and Eastern Europe, has established a reputation for accurate and objective reporting which, if it could be continued in the postwar period, would serve enormously to encourage a free press in Europe and to present world news in an honest and unbiased way and from an American point of view. Should not some way be found to preserve these values?
Might not an enterprising publisher be permitted to buy these properties from the Government and carry them on along properly modified civilian lines? . . .
EGBERT WHITE
New York City
Charity?
Sirs:
. . . Had I known the Lend-Lease food was regarded as charity I would not have touched a mouthful nor given any to my children and from now on they can go without orange juice as I shall go without all American foods.
If this has really been intended as a blow at our Socialist Government, as blows were dealt at European Socialist Governments in 1919, do not think it will have the effect intended. As Mr. Churchill once said, "What kind of a people do you think we are?" . . .
This sudden revelation ... has disgusted, angered and saddened me. Not for any food I shall lose, but to think the commodities sent have been sent in such a spirit, and withdrawn with such delighted glee. . . . Well, now we know where we are--I hope you feel happy with all your food--keep it.
(MRS.) KATHLEEN SPOONER
Amersham Bucks, England
Where Was Cherepanov's Soul?
Sirs:
In TIME [Aug. 27] Mr, Harry D. Radcliff is puzzled about the location of Private Cherepanov's soul after he was temporarily dead.
His confusion on the subject comes from the popular but mistaken idea that the soul is immortal, and is detached from the body at death, and survives as a separate living entity. Moses corrected this false idea centuries ago when he wrote: The life of the flesh is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11). The blood is in the body and the life is in the blood; not in a bloodless entity detached from the body, in life and in death. . . .
ROBERT G. HUGGINS
Cleveland
Sirs:
. . . It was right there with the body and would have continued there had the man been dead for a month. It is both unscientific and unscriptural to say the soul leaves the body at any time. Two scriptural examples: Lazarus had been dead four days. Decomposition had set in. When Jesus raised him He said, "Lazarus come forth," and Lazarus came forth with no account of anything unusual having occurred. . . . How about his soul? Lazarus was the soul himself. When Lazarus was dead his soul was also dead ("asleep" the Bible calls it). Also the young man whose funeral Jesus broke up. He stopped the coffin and said, "Young man, I say unto thee arise." The young man arose and his sleeping soul arose with him. . . .
WARREN LATHAM
Spokane, Wash.
Sirs:
. . . Charles Dickens, in chapter 3, vol. 2 of Our Mutual Friend asks the same question. Rogue Riderhood, apparently drowned, is in the hands of the physicians. Dickens comments:
"If you are not gone for good, Mr. Riderhood, it would be something to know where you are hiding at present. This flabby lump of mortality that we work so hard at with such patient perseverance, yields no sign of you. If you are gone for good, Rogue, it is very solemn, and if you are coming back, it is hardly less so. Nay, in the suspense and mystery of the latter question, involving that of where you may be now, there is a solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in attendance alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor."
MARION T. MACMILLAN
Oxford, Ohio
Sirs:
His soul remained attached by a tenuous chord to his heart within seven feet of his mortal body. . . .
E. M. SMOLA
New York City
Doldrums
Sirs:
You complain about the midsummer doldrums in literature. It is barely possible that you may be helping to cause these doldrums. Many of your readers might be interested to know about a best-selling novel called Dragon Harvest.
UPTON SINCLAIR
Monrovia, Calif.
P: By Upton Sinclair. TIME reviewed Wide Is the Gate, vol. 4 of Author Sinclair's serial-in-progress. Dragon Harvest is vol. 6. And the doldrums are more than midsummer.--ED.
Sirs:
You feel that the Russian soldier [TIME, Aug. 20] "thrusting a fistful of rubles" while "liberating" a German bicycle is "confused perhaps by the peculiar customs of an acquisitive society."
You may be right. For in all similar "liberations" by American troops of German bicycles, automobiles and household goods which we have witnessed, the rubles were entirely omitted.
(T/4) PHILIP JOHNSON (T/5) SIGMUND H. STEMBLER (T/5) GEORGE GRANT CARR (T/4) ROBERT B. NOTESTEIN (T/5) ROBERT J. SHAUGHNESSY
% Postmaster
New York City
Debut
Sirs:
All my life I've wanted a few things a young girl needs and prays for. So today I read about a $40,000 debut. Then I think that a thousand of American girls like myself could have gotten a watch or a coat, maybe braces for her teeth with a bit of money spent so lavishly and foolishly. . . . While we skimp and save and do without so much that could make us happy. I am a private in the Army . . . draw monthly $36. ... I'll bum cigarets when I am broke, but I'll never admire or respect these people who throw thousands of dollars away to show off their kids. . . . Maybe some day I'll have a fur coat and a swell watch, nice home and family--but damn I'll work like hell and raise my family with more sense and value of love and security than any of those 400 class kids will ever have. . . .
(PVT.) DAWN VAN HORN
Miami, Fla.
Sirs:
Betty Tyson's recent society splurge [TIME, Sept. 3] makes me snort at the exhortatiohs on unemployment. There's a lot of us who will never see that much money--the estimated $40,000 coming-out party--in our whole lives and it won't be because we don't work hard to earn it. ...
Furthermore, I've waited ten days for my new red points to come good, and like a lot of Americans substituted during the whole war. Just where did the Tysons secure the "sizzling rare cuts" so amply provided at this hour of the rationing program? Perhaps the most beneficial expense of this ridiculous show was the test of DDT, which suggests to the rest of us bourgeoisie that if we keep plugging, at least we won't have to swat flys any more.
JANE M. HUNT
East Haven, Conn.
Coat-&-Pants Barometer
Sirs:
A salute to the supreme tact and diplomacy of Ernest Bevin who, alone of all the King's Ministers, wears the striped trousers of the Tories and the short coat of the workingman [TIME, Sept. 3].
Perhaps Bevin's apparel will serve as a barometer of British politics.
When pants are plain, Then Labor will gain.
When coat has tail, Then Labor will fail.
ERNEST JACOBY
Mass.
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