Bad Seed or Bad Earth?

Sir:

"The Bad Seed" [July 8] is a sad story of a brutal father and of boys who had "the urge to kill." What's next for the boys? Years in jail, probably. Meantime, the Army will draft many other boys who have only a horror of killing; why not make boys like Ray Edwards and Marty Daniels professional soldiers? In the Army, they would have the respect of society instead of its condemnation.

M. G. LEONARD Fowler, Ohio

Sir:

TIME chose to use an old wives' slant in reporting this story: the bad father who once committed murder passes an inherent urge to kill on to his son. Bunk! How outdated! What juicy food for the hungry minds who love to believe such nonsense.

ELAINE R. POPE Boston

Sir:

Your story on Ray Edwards should not have been "The Bad Seed"; the title of another novel should have been borrowed and revised--"The Bad Earth"--in which the best of our seeds are wasted by the amateur gardeners we call society.

J. A. CHISCON Lafayette, Ind.

Too Little & Too Much

Sir:

The traffic safety conditions described in your June 24 article will undoubtedly be extremely advantageous to American motorists. However, the paramount highway problem is the frightening condition of too little brain power guiding too much horsepower.

JOHN M. LOUGHLIN

Sacramento, Calif.

Sir:

Do not Americans feel that your stupendous road-building program should include the erection of a monument to Henry Ford, who started the mass production of automobiles that revolutionized the American way of life, making the superhighways a necessity ?

RODOLFO JANUSZOWSKI Buenos Aires

Next Year's Beauties

Sir:

I read in your July 8 issue what is in store for us in the 1958 automobile. The powers that be in Detroit are really planning some beauties for next year. American cars are already too big, too powerful, too expensive to buy and operate. Why make them more so?

R. D. HARLAN II Pittsburgh

Sir:

I can hardly wait for those new models. I haven't really stopped laughing at the current ones yet.

GERALD R. BUNCE

Los Angeles

Sir:

Every year I look to the new crop of U.S. automobiles, hoping to find a sane, practical design reminiscent of the air-cooled Franklin

Airman series, circa 1927, or the Wills Sainte Claire Gray Goose, last seen in 1928. Your advance notices of what 1958 has in store doom me to continuing disappointment.

LEO TOCH Flushing, N.Y.

P: For a look at what Reader Toch longs for, see cuts.--ED.

Cash & Credit

Sir:

Inflation is but a phase of the money troubles depicted in your July 8 article on "The Treasury Mess." The root of the whole trouble lies in the misuse of money. Money is becoming so unstable that not only the people of the U.S. but most of the people of the free world are losing their faith in it. When faith in our money is gone, chaos results, and woe betide us all.

HAROLD HUNTER Westview, B.C.

Sir:

It is deplorable that TIME should print Professor Slichter's prediction that "creeping inflation is the least of three evils." Why should families living on fixed incomes be pauperized in order to sustain full employment and enrich organized labor? Surely it is more equitable to endeavor to stabilize prices even at the risk of some unemployment.

E. M. SPINGARN Washington, D.C.

Sir:

Today we have the creeping inflation of steadily increasing government borrowing, currency printing together with the inflation of individual credits urged upon the purchasers of automobiles, TV sets, washing machines, etc., all the way down to travel by banks, manufacturers, merchants and trans portation agencies. When the bubble bursts, 1857, 1873, J893, 1907 and 1929 will look like halcyon days of peace and prosperity.

L. FAIRCHILD New York City

Birdie Watchers

Sir:

Now that you have devoted three pages to Birdie .Tebbetts and his Redlegs, how about doing the same for the best team in the league--the Milwaukee Braves.

ANN JOBE

Coleman, Texas

Sir:

Baseball managers like Paul Richards of Baltimore, Casey Stengel of the Yanks and Bob Bragan of Pittsburgh could forget more about baseball than "Bird-lips" Tebbetts will ever know.

M. D. BALL

Springfield, Mass.

Where There's Smolce . . .

Sir:

Your July 8 Letters correspondent, Mr. Eugene B. Vest, asks to what extent non-smokers like himself have their lives shortened by sitting in smoke-filled rooms. Let me reassure him--not two-fifths of a second. My 79th year sustains this viewpoint. Down the years I have never lessened my smoking, my average being half a pound of pipe tobacco a week and a packet of cigarettes a day. This would work out roughly in 64 years to better than three-quarters of a ton of pipe tobacco--disregarding some hundreds of cigars and thousands of cigarettes.

FRANK C. WHITEHOUSE Vancouver, B.C.

Sir:

Whether or not cigarette smoking is detrimental to health, the very fact that there" is a doubt about it should be convincing enough that the habit does no one any good --except the manufacturer and seller of cigarettes. I dare say that every cigarette smoker would gladly give up the habit if he thought that he would not miss smoking and be unhappy about it. The fact is. as in my own case, a sense of pride comes with the fact that I possessed guts and gumption enough to give up the habit.

BERT MINAR Great Neck, N.Y.

Church v. Scholarship

Sir:

Jesuit Weigel's objective statements concerning the Roman Catholics' small contribution to U.S. scholarship [July 8] are to be highly commended. Could the reason for this be that the totalitarian nature of Roman Catholicism, with its thought-control mechanisms of censorship, blacklisting, "excommunication" threats, etc., creates an atmosphere in which the necessary spirit of truly free inquiry cannot exist?

R. L. BALTZ

Lexington, Mass.

Sir:

In this candid admission of scholarly shortcomings among the American Catholic community, Father Weigel has struck a telling blow at the differences dividing that community from its American Protestant brethren. He establishes a sympathetic bond with one of Protestantism's basic tenets--that responsible religious teaching must be intellectually free of disciplines that result in new questions being answered with outworn and inadequate, abstract verbalisms.

H. T. WHIPPLE Bronxville, N.Y.

Sir:

How can objective scholarship flourish in an atmosphere of book banning and miracles ?

(S/SgT.) CHARLES E. BAUMGARDNER New York City U.S.A.F.

Saints at Work

Sir:

Congratulations for the fine coverage on the Franciscan convention at Assisi. However, I must correct you on the information supplied that St. Anthony of Padua is "the patron of motorists." St. Christopher has a great deal more to say in matters of motorists than St. Anthony. The work of this great Franciscan saint is to find lost articles.*

WILLIAM C. SIMS St. Catharines, Ont.

Chiang's China Sir:

Your June 24 review of Chiang Kai-shek's Soviet Russia in China makes me question whether he has learned the really important lesson from "broken China" and whether, in view of your sympathetic review, we have learned that lesson. If Asia is to be liberated, let us first win the hearts of Asians by more realistic and efficient foreign aid. Let's put these people on their feet in such a way that they won't need our help indefinitely. Then we shall have self-reliant, se_lf-respecting partners in the fight against Communism.

W. L. HUSBAND Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

In Touch with TIME

Sir:

I'd like to express to you the work done by TIME in the international field. I know of no publication in any country today giving such varied and accurate information on a multiplicity of subjects--not only world politics and social movements but literature, music, painting and sculpture, archaeological and historical research, judicial decisions, aviation and scientific developments--in fact, every subject about which anybody who wants to keep in touch with a broad scope of world interests must keep accurately informed on, if he is not to appear to be a fossil survival of bygone days.

WARRINGTON DAWSON Versailles, France

* The pious belief in St. Anthony of Padua's (1195-1231) special power of restoring lost objects originated early in the 13th century when a rich traveler, who lost a bag of gold, asked for St. Anthony's intercession. The gold turned up the next morning, hanging from an elm tree.

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