The Steel Strike

Sir:

How long are we going to maintain the fiction that the steel strike is a strike against the steel companies? At one time strikes were largely against the owners, but now, at least the big strikes are against the general public.

STEPHEN J. BUTLER Aurora, Colo.

Sir:

We now find our progress limited and our security threatened by the unbridled greed of organized labor, against which our laws provide little or no protection.

Three crippling industry-wide strikes have been imposed on us by the steel, copper, and dock workers. Nearly all of us are workers, but we can recognize greed when we see it. Clearly none of these strikes are justified this year.

THOMAS W. MITCHAM Tucson, Ariz.

Happy Equation

Sir:

I am not at all unhappy about being a "compensation," and I suppose I don't mind being a "sort of Ivy League Dracula" [in the Oct. 19 review of Pillow Talk]. I can smell a compliment better than anyone I have ever met. No, all I really have to complain about is that I think you underrate Clark Gable [in the Oct. 12 review of But Not for Me]; he's really a deceptively good artist. That's all--but if overrating me goes with underrating him, then God praise the equation. TONY RANDALL

Los Angeles

Progress in Atrocities

Sir:

Your Oct. 12 article on Red China's Liu Shao-chi is quite interesting, but you fail to present the actual side of progress and improvement. It is the side of approximately 500,000,000 people being helped in conquering hunger.

The "Big Leap Forward" was and is a miscalculation by a regime that is still trying to pull the correct strings of economic and political statesmanship. China is potentially strong; it is a country which, whether we like it or not, will give us a great deal of trouble in its growing process. But this process cannot be halted any more, regardless of its errors and atrocities.

STEFAN F. L. GRUNWALD

New York City

Sir:

A round of applause is in order for Boris Chaliapin for his cover. Never has there been a lexical or pictorial representation of degradation of human dignity of such impact as his composition of the ant colony of human beings.

JERRY WALTER

Salt Lake City

Sir:

How do you translate the slogan on the cover [see cut] ?

P. M. BAYNE

Wolfville, N.S.

P:I It says "Support peace."--ED.

Over Twenty One

Sir:

Re the kiss-and-tell TV contestants of the ill-famed quiz shows [Oct. 19]: it takes at least two to make a bargain, crooked or otherwise.

MARK L. JOHNSON

Fort Worth

Sir:

The crucifixion of Charles Van Doren is horrible testimony to the immaturity of our culture. Having idolized a brilliant man, people now ridicule him as they discover he is not the god they pretended but very much human. Van Doren didn't glorify himself; such publicity can't be bought.

NBC apparently believes in a guilty-until-proved-innocent policy. It is frightening, regardless of how the game Twenty One was played, that an organization with such power in choosing vast quantities of ideas to be presented on TV to the American people can practice such an un-American ideal.

CAROLINE HOFF

Ossining, N.Y.

Sir:

It seems time for someone to raise a voice on behalf of the rather unpopular Messrs. Barry and Enright. What they did has been common practice in the radio-TV audience participation world since the earliest day of the layman's being exploited for the amusement of his fellows and the profit of management. The fuss is like a man standing up in a theater shouting, "He didn't really saw her in half ... I want the whole thing investigated." It should be emphasized that Barry, Enright et al. did a magnificent job as producers of suspenseful entertainment programs. For this whole thing to be before a committee of the Congress is ludicrous, and a damned waste of time and money.

LEE WALLACE Beverly Hills, Calif.

Sir:

Advertising has long been well directed in its appeal to stupidity. In our eagerness to accept what we want to believe, we are easy prey for those who tell us what we want to hear. Convinced that we can get something for nothing, and delighted at being fooled, we go to carnivals, shop where we get Green Stamps and vote Democratic. But we are still so naive that we get all shook up when told that our favorite fairy story is make-believe or that the quiz show has a script.

DEIGH D. BOYD South Laguna, Calif.

Space Race

Sir:

On your Oct. 12 story on the space race: here is another time when you have expressed my thoughts down to the last word.

Two years ago Washington told everyone we would catch up to the Soviets within two years. Well, here we are, and the timetable now calls for another two years. It seems we have not received the Soviets' promise to stand still while we try to catch up.

R. S. GERY Cleveland

Sir:

The increasing superiority of the Russians in rocketry could very easily signal the downfall of the U.S. as a power and symbol in our world. For if the Russians can conquer the universe, what worry have they of a small spot on tiny earth that just happens not to agree with their ideology ? An underdeveloped country is bound to ally itself with obviously universal authority rather than with vague, immaterial idealisms.

NANCY LLACH-HILL Paoli, Pa.

Sir:

Is it just possible that witch hunts and un-American affairs committee hearings, some while back, somewhat dampened the spirit of U.S. scientists and contributed to the seven-league-boot advance of Soviet science over the U.S.?

ERNEST J. OPPENHEIMER*

Parow, Union of South Africa

Sir:

Why not show the fault where it really lies: the monumental unconcern of the American public in space matters before the first Sputnik went into orbit. TIME has pointed out that missile and space programs constitute a national effort. There is no longer any doubt that in a democracy huge undertakings and the blazing of new technical trails must enjoy wholehearted public support. The years when this support was lacking are now felt. We, the American people as a whole, are to blame.

CARLA L. PROW

Hampton, Va.

Right to Select

Sir:

In regard to the Oct. 12 article on segregation in Northern schools, many of our forefathers came to this continent for the express purpose of segregating themselves from others with whom they did not wish to associate. Democracy is not wholly a one-way street. People have as much right to pick their own companions and their own schools for their children as they do to pick their own politics and religion.

A. E. CORNELL Erie, Pa.

"Sometimes Nightmarish"

Sir:

Your Oct. 12 review of the Avedon-Capote Observations seems to me to have been quite unfair to Capote's prose, which strikes me as admirably suited to Avedon's remarkable photographs. Avedon's photographs isolate his figures from the rest of the world; their isolation gives them a strange, dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish quality that Capote's highly subjective, highly impressionistic prose accents and reiterates. For a change, we have a book in which picture and text cooperate.

MARK SCHORER Berkeley, Calif.

Memories of Hiroshima

Sir:

As a Jew, I was horrified by the assumption of Mr. Israel Ben Zeev [the director of the World Union for the Propagation of Judaism] that the Japanese people would reject Christianity because they have memories of Hiroshima and the nuclear phenomenon [Oct. 12].

May I remind Mr. Zeev that the basic formula for nuclear power was conceived by some of Judaism's greatest minds.

L. LAWSON WOLFF Fayetteville, N.C.

Sir:

The World Union director and dozens of others continually harp on Hiroshima. Doesn't the thought ever enter their minds that if there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn't have been a Hiroshima? DAN WASSERMAN

Venice, Calif.

Si le Vin Est Bon

Sir:

I read with interest of Louisiana's folk-loring Harry Oster in the Oct. 12 edition. The lyric, "Oh, when I die Bury me with my head under the tap . . ." recalls a French drinking song I gratefully sang several times through with a Lebanese student friend in a Cambridge, England hospital while having a much-mangled thumb sewn up without anesthetic. The words:

Chevaliers de la Table Ronde,

Goutons voir si le vin est bon . . .

Quand je meurs, je veux qu'on m'enterre

Dans une cave ou il y a du bon vin.

Et les pieds contre la muraille,

Et la tete sous le robinet.*

MARTIN BLAKEWAY

Vancouver, B.C.

*No kin to the late diamond magnate Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, nor to Nuclear Physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

*Gentlemen of the Round Table,

Let's taste to see if the wine is good . . .

When I die, I wish to be buried

In a cellar where there is good wine;

My feet against the wall,

And my head underneath the tap.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.