Campaign Posters

Sir: It seems fitting that you should have Robert Kennedy as your cover subject [May 24] one week following your analysis of poverty in America. Senator Kennedy is a man who has not sought to ignore the poor but rather to give them new hope. He has done this through identification with minorities. As the one candidate to be accepted completely by Negroes, he best offers the solution to America's most distressing domestic problems--racial unrest and urban decay.

GEORGE M. ELLIOTT

Monrovia, Calif.

Sir: Hubert Humphrey first proposed or was largely responsible for the passage of important progressive programs that are now part of our way of life. They include Medicare, Food for Peace, the Peace Corps, the Disarmament Agency, the Job Corps, aid to college students, and key advances in civil rights. Kennedy has pioneered no single successful advance. He now tells us we must "move this nation in a different direction." But exhortations do not make change. Although these two candidates have essentially similar progressive views, only one has shown the ingenuity and political competence to bring about positive change. Humphrey will never stand for the status quo.

FRANK P. DIPRIMA

Plainfield, NJ.

Sir: Humphrey's giddy "happy" politics is superficial and disgusting. Eugene McCarthy's attempt is gallant but impractical. Kennedy seems to be the only Democratic candidate who has heard the nation's heartbeat, eloquently expressed its melancholy, and injected a note of hope tempered with pragmatic realism.

STEVE SAVAGE

Nashville, Tenn.

Sir: If the Governor of Indiana had recalled his Kipling, he might have paraphrased about Bobby:

Some fools there were

And they made their prayer

To two million bucks

And a hank of hair.

C. W. TREICHLER

Glenside, Pa.

Colts on the Campus

Sir: Youth is fulminating all over the landscape, in walkouts, sit-ins, and other forms of exhibitionism. Seventy-five years ago, I inspired a walkout and was temporarily suspended. There has been no psychological change in youth in these 75 years. I know--I have lived with them. The colt in the pasture sometimes kicks a hole in the fence. He will probably mature into a very fine horse. If he is to be trained it sometimes requires a tight rein and sometimes a flip of the whip on the buttocks. Most of these youngsters of ours will mature into substantial citizens and will add much to the social order of their day. But one thing they must learn now--that the frustration of the law means tyranny.

ERNEST W. TOWNE

Wollaston, Mass.

Sir: I was a part of the "silent generation," stuttering in apathy with signs of decadence all around campus and submissive suffering on the faces of my fellow students. We shook our heads, walked away, and paid our dues for four years. But these student activists are getting things done--congratulations.

PAUL KACER

Moline, Ill.

Price of Poverty

Sir: TIME'S cover story on poverty [May 17] prompted these thoughts: I believe that if we spent just one-half of what we now allow for Aid for Dependent Children on the building and staffing of good resident institutions--call them orphanages if you must--and set up the legal and social-work procedures needed to get a majority of hard-core poor children into these institutions at an early age, we could make some real progress toward eliminating the evils associated with poverty. Children must develop in something other than a degenerating social and physical environment if they are not to degenerate. True, institutionalization of the young is a threat to the concept of the sanctity of motherhood. But gad! Where in the hovels TIME describes is the validity of this concept?

JOHN L. HORN, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology

University of Denver

Sir: When you write that "contrary to the impression given by riots and all other conspicuous problems of the slums, Negroes are not the major component of that group, at least not in numbers: two out of every three poor Americans are white," you imply that black people have no sociological justification for their violent discontent.

According to the special report prepared for President Johnson in October, only 13% of all white families are classified as poor. But 32% of all black families are classified as poor. Thus, while only one out of every seven white persons in America is poor, one out of every three black persons is poor. What's more, 45% of all substandard housing in America is occupied by black people.

CHUCK STONE

Washington, D.C.

Sir: There was a six-year-old ghetto boy admitted to the hospital where I worked for treatment of rheumatic fever. We became aware that Jimmy was a disturbed youngster, and we did some psychological testing. Jimmy, in tests that are admittedly culture-bound, tested out at an IQ of 125. His mother was as you've described the poverty-stricken--dull and depressed. We all looked at Jimmy in helpless despair. We knew that in all likelihood, he would either become depressed and his IQ would gradually go down to a dull level, or he would use his brains for crime or some other sociopathic activity. The point of this is not the trouble Jimmy will eventually cost this nation but the cost in terms of the loss. We in this nation cannot afford such waste. We are all the poorer because we have lost that little boy. To me, the cost of poverty is that, not the money we spend to sustain or help.

PAULA KLIEGMAN

Chicago

Learn, Baby, Learn

Sir: Re your Essay "What Can I Do?" [May 17]: in an Afro-American history class I have learned what really took place in this democratic U.S. 100 years ago that I was not taught in high school or college. While the people of this country are paying homage to such men as Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry, they would do well to honor Stevens, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison and Denmark Vesey. The greatest personal commitment one can make to himself today is "Learn, Baby, Learn!"

SANDRA BRUZZESE

Los Angeles

Custom in Christ's Time

Sir: Your article under the heading of "Morality" [May 10] was very interesting. I have been writing about this and saying it in lectures since 1936, and at one stage was severely reprimanded and threatened with excommunication because I wrote that in the circumstances of a primitive society where there was a surplus of women over men, and there was no form of career for these women to undertake, Christ would prefer to see those women as the second wife in a Christian home than making a living as prostitutes. In fact, when Christ was challenged about his views on Mosaic laws, he stated: "I come not to destroy the law but to uphold it." Then when he was questioned on the subject, he quoted direct from Genesis 2; and since, at that time, polygamy was a common custom, and Christ never spoke against it during his lifetime, it must therefore be assumed that he was not against it. Moreover, if I remember correctly from my reading of church history, it was not until about A.D. 490 that a certain synod suddenly decided that the communicant members of the Christian Church must henceforth be monogamous, and until that time--nearly 500 years--members of the Christian Church were allowed to have more than one wife, and only priests and deacons, following the injunction set down by St. Paul, had to be confined to one wife.

L. S. B. LEAKEY

London

The Pay's the Thing

Sir: Your comments on the regional theaters and their seeming inability to cultivate playwrighting talent [May 17] are apt, but they may be prematurely and unjustly damning as well. The world's greatest dramatists--Shakespeare, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Goldoni--wrote their works in cooperation with, and specifically for, permanent ensemble companies. The great drama of the past was consistently given the financial support of the state and/or the overwhelming enthusiasm of the general public. American theater has neither.

Great theater surely survives and nourishes through great men and great ideas, but it is naive to suppose that no one is going to have to pay for it. It may be the playwright's "molten fury that welds mind to mind, heart to heart," and so forth, but it is cold, hard, unglorious cash that pays the lighting bills. And, for that matter, the playwright.

MARILYN MEYERS

Drama Program

Tufts University

London

Tiny Tim, the Pop Prophet

Sir: In no more searching fashion is the Zeitgeist of youth identified than in the tone essays of the yearning prophet, Tiny Tim [May 17]. His sardonic yet poignant treatment of pop tunes, which transmutes them into symbolic manifestoes of pragmatic idealism, reveals a seer, demanding in his quest for the infinity of meaning, yet Christ-like in his gentleness. How well has Tiny Tim related his quest--everyman's quest--for identity; he summons, and we, the youth, must answer.

C. MCALEER

Philadelphia

Sir: This passion for "camp" is analogous to a passion for ugliness. He can be counted among the numbers of sick comedians, rotten quiz programs, tasteless soap operas, and other countless uglinesses that America produces. It is too bad that the American public supports such trash. I say send him back to "dreary Greenwich Village bars" and deliver us from any more of his falsetto.

NANCY WARREN

Kansas City, Mo.

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