Wasp Stings

Sir: In good humor, I must protest your Essay, "Are The WASPS Coming Back . . . ?" [Jan 17], because of your lack of understanding of just who is a Wasp!

Your misleading statement, which would include as Wasps such Presidents as Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson, stuns my Celtic image. They were Celts!

Anglo-Saxons are Germanic peoples; Angles and Saxons came to England to clobber the native inhabitants (Celtic), many of whom fled to the mountainous sections of Wales, Scotland and to Ireland and to the Isle of Man.

Theodore Roosevelt, though paternally of Dutch descent, was Celtic on his mother's side of the house (Bulloch), and F.D.R. was descended from the Clan Livingstone of Argyllshire. Be careful, too, in classifying Senator Edmund Muskie as Polish; several thousand Celts settled his country many centuries ago! John D. Rockefeller is Celtic through the Davison branch. True, Bundy, Diller, Coffin, are Wasps, but not McCloy and Wallace.

The Celtic nations of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany are proud of their heritage and will never submerge in a diluted Anglo-Saxon rigidity and repressiveness!

After all, it was the fervor of Celtic Patrick Henry which stirred the imaginations of colonial Americans!

(THE REV.) JAMES A. M. HANNA United Presbyterian Church Oak Hill, Ohio

Sir: Good grief! Color me Roman Catholic and add an exultant, buoyant Deo Gratias. Could life be as dull and dutiful as the Wasp world you fashion?

PAT SOMERS CRONIN Chicago

Sir: I protest the use of the term Wasp as the equivalent of "Americans of the old stock." There is a comparatively small but very proud and loyal group of people in the U.S. whose ancestors were both Catholics and Americans long before the influx of ethnic groups. They include Marylanders, Frenchmen in St. Louis and New Orleans, Castilian Spaniards in the Southwest and certain families in Philadelphia and other coast cities. Mr. Sargent Shriver is the most prominent man of this group at the present time. To refer to him as a "Waspirant" is as insulting as it would have been to accuse Charles Carroll of Carrollton of trying to gain equality with John Adams. In both cases, the equality already existed. Also, your reference to the Veiled Prophet's Ball as a "Wasp event" is strange to anyone from the St. Louis area. We consider the Bakewells and the Desloges, the Chouteaus and Christys as the "inner core" of St. Louis life.

ROSE JOSEPHINE BOYLAN East St. Louis, Ill.

Goodbye, with Thanks

Sir: On Tuesday, Jan. 14, Americans should have realized that the good man who has been every American's scapegoat for the past five years was indeed sincere in his efforts to move the U.S. ahead. Economic, domestic and international problems have long been festering in our country and the world. They did not arrive in Washington when Lyndon Johnson took of fice; nor is it likely that they will leave with Richard Nixon as President.

If Johnson failed to reach his goals, it is only because his goals were the gigantic ideals most Americans hold. He thought we could meet these goals together. Evidently, we couldn't. He didn't live up to our idea of a great President? Maybe we didn't live up to his idea of a great America either. He did move us closer to the answers to many of our problems. No human could do more, no fellow human could ask more of him. Beneath the painful criticisms, Lyndon Johnson's was one of the most progressive, active administrations our nation has seen for a long time.

DEBBI EWING Hobart, Ind.

Tiger by the Tail

Sir: Fox and Tiger certainly offer some entertaining and useful hypotheses in their attempt to unravel the biological bases for human behavior [Jan. 17]. They argue that "men are biologically more political than women, in the sense that they have a greater ability for what psychologists call 'bonding' or the ability to forge lasting relationships." If by ''political" one means loyalty to a chosen leader, manipulations of the quid pro quo variety and gang behavior, one should recall that women have been prevented from indulging in such sports by the fact that aggressive, active, manipulative, gang-oriented women cannot expect to find husbands in present-day America. Within my own acquaintance, indeed, there are older women who do not vote because they do not think voting is a woman's business. Such cultural lag between the precepts of women's behavior that were the product of Victorian schooling and more modern ideas of equality should be examined as still existing as well in the minds of many male investigators; one might call it genito-centrism. Again, Fox and Tiger make an astonishing generalization about control over sex and aggression, feelings about status and group loyalty, possessiveness and a host of other behavior patterns: "all these are part and parcel of the evolution of the brain." The brain? Do these gentlemen know anything about the socializing of human infants? Do they know how much animal behavior is learned? We must beware of attributing permanent characteristics to a physical organ that, like a computer, depends to a large extent on how it is programmed by each generation.

South Hadley, Mass.

ESTELLE JUSSIM

Sir: When Plato, to enthusiastic applause, defined man as a featherless biped, the cynic Diogenes left the Academy, returned a short time later and held up a plucked chicken, crying, "Here is your man!" Certainly it does not take a Diogenes to see the absurdity in attempting to explain man's behavior, so patently unanimal-like, in terms of animals--as men like Lorenz, Washburn and others do. These men commit the same errors as 19th century biological determinists, universalizing a very limited explanation of man's activities. Man is emphatically not an animal. The reason that so much of his activities appear "unnatural" to Mr. Fox is that man does not act out of instinct; his actions are defined by conscious intention, which no animal possesses.

EUGENE P. MCCREARY Champaign, Ill.

P.S.

Sir: Ex Post facto re your fine, nostalgic report on The Saturday Evening Post: Ironically, our sad final day on the job--and the date of your issue--was Jan. 17, the 263rd anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin.

RICHARD LEHMAN Copy Chief

The Saturday Evening Post Edison, N.J.

Sir: The demise of The Saturday Evening Post was decided back in 1961 when the Post, through a minor editor, covered the annual convention of magicians here.

I was with the late Harry Blackstone, foremost of magicians, when he moved to Colon in the mid-twenties and purchased a local island for his summer home. The town soon became known as "Magic City." In 1945 Maurice Zolotow did a long Post story about Blackstone: "Magician No. 1."

An older Blackstone was a highly honored guest at the 1961 convention, having traveled here from retirement in Los Angeles. Ill with asthma, he gave hours of his scarce time to pose under hot lights in an unventilated old opera house so that a Post photographer could take roll after roll of color photographs for another article.

When the Post story ("Magic's Merry Mecca") appeared in 1962, the only photograph included was mostly of a young female contortionist, in bra and G-string, sitting on a rug in the middle of Colon's main street. It occupied most of one page. Of Blackstone, the Post stated: "... a magnificent relic." The final comment Blackstone made to me was, "I'll turn them into rabbits."

KEN MURRAY Colon, Mich.

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