Candidate Kefauver
Sir:
Re your March 24 cover of Estes Kefauver: Is it the presidency of the United States he is seeking, or the lead in a hillbilly comedy ?
HARRY T. MOWSON Rochester, N.Y.
Sir:
... I am a Republican "but I have never read such a prejudiced article. . .
FRANCINE BRETT New York City
Sir:
Talk about "damning with faint praise"--you couldn't have ruined Kefauver's chances more if you'd taken a meat ax to him . . .
JANE MCCLELLAN RAYMOND Braintree, Mass.
. . . Although your article on Kefauver is about the most obvious attempt at belittlement that I've seen for some time, a picture of a truly impressive man stands out. There is now no doubt as to whom I want to vote for.
ROBERT C. SIMS Watertown, Mass.
The Great Bookster (Cont'd)
Sir:
Mortimer Adler is with us again, I see. Like the seven-year itch, he crops up right on schedule. But why TIME [March 17] should make an issue out of Adler's banalities is beyond me ... His sophistries are more transparent than ever. His furious preoccupation with thought is an academic pose. There is no need for him to make believe that he is searching for truth, because he has it up his sleeve all the time . . .
ARTHUR A. DIENER New York City
Sir:
Congratulations on your cover of March 17. If St. Patrick were alive, he would be helping Mortimer Adler drive the snakes out of modern education.
R. T. MALONE Lincoln, Neb.
Sir:
If Adler is half as good as he or your writer seems to think he is, Mr. Adler can stop looking for God. A glance in the mirror will give him the answer . . .
ROBERT G. MEAD JR. Storrs, Conn.
Sir:
Adler, who "started strangling the snake of positivism almost in his cradle," confuses his philosophical asp with his theological elbow--and TIME comes tumbling after. What Adler would do is to identify philosophy with religion. Though this is not a new enterprise, Adler thinks that he has given it what it has for centuries lacked: a sound logical basis. Modern logicians (fusty gentlemen who, as a rule, do not hire others to do their doctoral research), many of whom are not positivists, refuse to preside at Adler's shotgun marriage. Thus Adler's quarrel is not only with positivism, but with all logical analysis. While he may be "probably one of the best minds at large today," he is no logician . . .
PETER ANTON
Bloomington, Ind.
Sir:
. . . When I had finished the article, I felt it was a pity Gertrude Stein did not use a blunt instrument when she hit him on the head.
E. E. SMITH San Diego
Sir:
Thank God for Adler, who believes in teaching students to think. Every year universities confer more & more degrees, and every year it seems the national I.Q. drops a bit lower. Going to college is fashionable in the same way the poodle cut was, and any education obtained is not only merely incidental, but often accidental. Students are put through an assembly line of ideas and are told what to think. Any deviation from the accepted, any originality is frowned upon . . .
FRANCES GIBSON Memphis, Tenn.
Sir:
Please place me in the Amen corner for Mortimer Adler. And for TIME'S superlative description of the Great Books project. Philosophy, indeed, is everybody's business . . . Let us educate the freed citizen for a free life, and give him the knowledge to live it intelligently.
ARTHUR F. NICHOLSON Indiana, Pa.
Sir:
Your publication of John Dewey's photograph with the caption "More dangerous than Hitler?" is an example of cheap journalism ... It is Adler and his allies who are the real Hitlers amongst us. For they are scholastic formalists who are positive that they and they alone know all the answers . . . and since they are incapable of doubt, they are plotting in the most insidious ways to force their interpretation of right & wrong down the throats of the people . . .
AGNES E. MEYER
Washington, B.C.
Sir:
... Is there still time for a renaissance of learning in the U.S., or have we "progressed" with Dewey too far into the educational dark ages? If so, our educators can doubtless console themselves with the thought that advanced bead-stringing will prove functional in a society of cave dwellers.
JOHN H. MclNTYRE
Philadelphia
Sir:
As a quasi-pragmatist I got quite a kick from your Adler article . . . Perhaps education is a racket, but as any high-school lad knows, there is none bigger than selling "Great Books" to hopeful parents, whereupon they collect dust and provide quarters for termites in the parlor.
DAN CRUSE Beaumont, Texas
Sir:
Readers of the early season scrimmage of the Great Ideas may relish this anecdote. Intending to be facetious, I once asked an ardent indexer whether God had been included in the index. His prompt, patronizing and humorless reply stunned me: "Yes, but we've subdivided him."
RICHARD M. KAIN Louisville, Ky.
Sir:
. . .As a social psychologist, I was impressed with Adler's selection of the 102 Great Ideas. How does he logically exclude the idea of "Humility"? Perhaps this is an idea too foreign to such a great and noble mind? . . .
ROBERT M. FRUMKIN Ohio State University Columbus
P:J Humility, which is included in the index-to the Great Ideas, is, according to Dr. Adler, "a virtue attached to Christian charity."--ED.
Sir:
... I consider your article one of the finest pieces I have ever read in any magazine ... As a lawyer, I was particularly interested in the reference to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, around whom a cult of greatness has so unjustly risen. In the history of American courts, no man's influence has been so blatantly evil. Those who have been bewitched by his pungent expressions have failed to note that no figure in the history of the American judiciary has had such a sinister influence. If his legal philosophy were ever fully accepted and translated into operation by our Government and our people, it could only lead to the same type of evil totalitarianism we saw in Germany and are now seeing in Russia . . .
J. NEWMAN TOOMEY Iowa City, Iowa
Sir:
. . . Having emerged from the modern pedagogical grist mill (a well-meaning teachers' college), I find myself equipped with every advanced teaching technique inspired by Dewey & Co.'s pragmatism, only to realize I have all the answers to my students' queries save one: "Why we exist" . . . Civilization has been plagued too often by egocentric materialism, superman demagoguery, and every inspirational effort such as Adler's is urgently needed to buttress the bastions of Western civilization in its inevitable collision with the Russian menace . . .
PATRICK M. O'BRIEN
Eau Claire, Wis.
Sir:
... We can thank Adler, Hutchins and their associates for highlighting for the American people what should have been obvious: viz., that the pragmatic-relativism of the Deweys, the Hooks, the Holmeses, the Vinsons, the Frankfurters et al., with its necessary consequent of moral individualism and moral anarchism, must logically develop into the amoral dialectical-materialism of the Soviet State, the apotheosis of positivism . . .
THOMAS PADRAIC BURNS Somerville, Mass.
Sir:
... I have spent 13 years in China as a Catholic priest ... I was director of education in my diocese with Chiang Kai-shek's board of education. I found that Deweyites and positivists were in control of China's former educators. University students were filled with pragmatism, yet seeking truth without finding anyone who could give it to them. The teachers and others with influence were American-educated . . .
I spent a year with the Communists when they took over, and from their intellectuals I learned that their leaders consider that the philosophical school of the English-speaking world is their greatest ally. They are quite frank about this. They told me that in their schools they are taught that there are only two things existing in the world today to prevent Communist domination--American atomic power (they expect to get control of this when a depression hits America), and the Catholic Church . . .
(REV.) HAROLD J. MURPHY Vice-Rector
St. Francis Xavier Seminary Scarboro Bluffs, Ont., Canada
Sir:
. . . May I ask one simple question? Just what is Mr. Adler's I.Q. ?
LUISA KREIS Portland, Me.
P:I Dr. Adler modestly admits to "around 185."--ED.
Why Mothers Get Grey
Sir:
Congratulations to Dr. Norman F. Miller for finally bringing to the forefront the brash treatment new mothers receive at the hands of our modern hospitals [TIME, March 17]. After the birth of my children, I couldn't wait to get back home for an honest-to-good-ness rest, and escape from the clutches of hospital personnel who told me when I could and could not have the use of a bedpan . . .
VIRGINIA A. NOCETI Pittsburgh
Sir:
. . . For 21 nights I had a sedative, not to put me to sleep but to keep me asleep while the two-legged ice horse clopped through her rounds at 4 a.m. If her method of awakening one was unsuccessful, the 5 a.m. turning on of lights was successful . . .
BETTE BARTELT New Albany, Ind.
Sir:
Does Dr. Norman F. Miller also know about the night nurse who wakes the soundly sleeping mother for the purpose of giving her a sleeping pill? . . .
It really happened to me.
MELISSA S. PHILLIPS Silver Spring, Md.
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