Camera-Shy Roosevelt

Sirs:

On p. 62, column 2, of your last issue [TIME, April 16 ], I notice you carefully refrain from any condemnation of the act of the Junior Roosevelt. ... An assault by any other name is still an assault as anyone with a less prominent name would have found. Is the entire Roosevelt family sacrosanct?

The early account of this affair which I read in the Philadelphia papers called attention to disparity of size & weight of the assaultee & assaulted. Had this photographer been a burly six-footer would he have been handled in this summary manner? Incidentally Young Roosevelt has received more publicity than having himself photographed. I voted for his father.

J. WERTHEIMER

Atlantic City, N. J.

Junior Roosevelt did not strike Cameraman Corvelli. He tackled and bore him to the floor. What he wanted was the camera, upon which he stomped savagely, but without damage to the prize plate in Corvelli's pocket.--ED.

"Insults & Falsehoods"

Sirs:

There appears on p. 23 of your April 9 issue of TIME magazine an article under the heading of Foreign News which sets out an interview with one Juan Leguia. As a Peruvian and as the son of Eugenio Larrabure, former vice president of Peru, serving during Augusto B. Leguia's first term, I want to take most emphatic exception to the slanderous and malicious statements which your article attributes to this person.

When this article first came to my attention, misrepresenting as it does the conditions in my country, and more particularly the activities of this expatriot, I can only believe that they were published for the sole purpose of ridicule. I sincerely hope that TIME magazine could have been prompted by no other impulse than to hold up to ridicule a man who first betrays his country and then, in a puerile effort to curry favor in a foreign land, so belittles himself as to heap upon his fellow-countrymen the insults and falsehoods to which this man has given utterance.

In view of the fact that the President of the U. S. and many others close to him have been for many months attempting to promote a closer relationship between the U. S. and the South American countries, it seems to me that such an article is ill-timed. . . .

GERMAN LARRABURE

Consul of Peru

Detroit, Mich.

Sirs:

Your account of expatriated Juan Leguia's story of Peru was well introduced over his whiskey glass, but out of respect to wonderful little Peru and some of its blooded and true gentlemen (all of whom are proud of their Incan ancestors), you should have let it go as a drinking tale. Never could such a fanciful story help explain the many Latin American revolutions. . . .

Your article was interesting--TIME always is --but remember that Peruvians who read it laughed, as did Juan Leguia himself, the fat and banished whiskey strainer.

RICHARD LEE

Lead, S. Dak.

The March of TIME

Sirs:

We were delighted that our President permitted you to impersonate him in your hour tonight [April 13]. We regret exceedingly that it is the last evening we shall spend with your wonderful actors until next fall--for surely you will come back to us then. "The March of TIME," to our way of thinking, is the outstanding hour on the air.

THE RINGLE FAMILY

Tiffin, Ohio

Sirs:

Your weekly program has been a great stimulation to me. It disappoints me that you have decided to drop the program until the fall. I regard your effort as of more value than any other single feature on the air. I hope some keen business mind may think it wise to induce you to carry on.

Another word. Your simulation of the President's voice is the best single attraction you have ever offered. When you go back on the air, it is my sincere hope that the President may give you permission to perform a matchless public service by presenting each week a message from him in his own words--and in his own voice!

M. B. ANDREWS

Goldsboro, N. C.

Sirs:

By all means resume your broadcasting of "The March of TIME" at the earliest possible moment. ... I sincerely hope the Remington Rand Co. will continue to enable us to hear the dramatized news of the week on the air.

H. H. GUERNSEY

Providence, R. I.

Sirs:

The most broadminded thing President Roosevelt has done since he took office was to allow you to use his "voice" again in your March of TIME this evening!

Of course, we want you back again next fall at all costs. In fact it might not be a bad idea to have an Executive Order to that effect.

D. B. BARLOW

Philadelphia, Pa.

School Dictatorship

Sirs:

As a teacher I suppose I should protest the satiric manner in which you reported the crisis in Education (TIME. April 16), but I am rather inclined to agree with your treatment although, perhaps, for different reasons.

Had the educational system in this country been the demigod some have supposed, any crisis in its health should have been viewed with alarm. But the fact is that education is still several decades behind present-day social and economic needs. The whole vast secondary-school system is nothing more nor less than a widespread and well-organized college "prep" course. A majority of the colleges are training schools for the professions, as if we could successfully operate an industrial world with trained ministers, lawyers, teachers, doctors and dentists while all other workers remained untrained.

We (the high schools) are governed by a dictatorship of the colleges and the colleges are governed by a dictatorship of 19th Century ideals of cultural education. . . .

Until the schools adopt truly educational programs, the hue and cry about reduced budgets, etc., is not really important. I say this in spite of the fact that my livelihood depends on those same budgets and I have felt the influence of the most extreme demand for economy.

ALBERT C. BOYD

Mathematics Instructor

Crystal Falls High School

Crystal Falls, Mich.

"Weakness of Intellect, Birdie!"

Sirs:

If Professor Pereda (TIME, April 9) was "too weak to speak" at any time during his seven-day hunger strike, "it was weakness of intellect, birdie, I cried" and not weakness due to famine.

Though Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, and plenty of other witnesses (of whom I am one) have asserted and proved that a reasonably well-nourished body will show no pronounced effect from even a ten-day fast, newspapers constantly give harrowing details of emaciation and dissolution after fasts of three and four days.

Which just ain't so--particularly where the fast is deliberately undertaken.

In 1911, after two years suffering with nervous indigestion. I tried a week's fast--induced by reading Upton Sinclair's articles on fasting as a cure. I ate nothing, drank only water. (Incidentally, I had just had my tonsils removed on the day my fast began).

During the week I did my writing job as usual. I wasn't exactly bouncing with energy, but I not only wasn't too weak to talk, I wasn't too weak to walk half a mile to the post office and back on the sixth day. I lost five pounds.

My indigestion wasn't cured, but it was helped. . . .

As Upton Sinclair once wrote: "When a man dies after three days without food, he dies of fright, not starvation. Unless that three days follows months of malnutrition and semi-starvation. . . ."

BERTOX BRALEY

Bridgeport, Conn.

Does TIME ever get anything right?

Professor Pereda (TIME. April 9, p. 18), during his seven-day fast, did not go home to bed--he remained at the Plaza night and day. And he did not shrill at the woman from the U. S. when he said: "You damned woman!"

FRANK R. HAXXEX

San Juan, P. R.

Twisted Blackmer

Sirs:

TIME should have submitted the caption on the Blackmer picture (April 16, p. 16) to its cinemacritic.

Not at the left, but at the right, is Actor Sidney Blackmer. Most likely guess as to identity of the person misnamed Blackmer: Cinemactor George Meeker. . . .

JOHN A. THOMAS

New York City

For a twisted caption. TIME accepts rebuke. But Reader Thomas guesses wrong. The three in the picture were (right to left): Sidney Blackmer, Actress Claudia Dell and one Ira Uhr.--ED.

"Arms and the Men"

Sirs:

In the Letters column of your issue of April 9. Doubleday, Doran & Co. stated that they would send a pamphlet reprint of FORTUNE'S "Arms and the Men" article to anyone who sent us 10-c-. We printed 2,500 copies of this pamphlet and had no idea that a single letter in TIME'S correspondence column would cause 3,500 people to send their requests and their dimes to Garden City in the first four days after the letter appeared. This was unique in our experience. We are now rapidly printing 10,000 more copies of the pamphlet. Will you be good enough to explain to your readers that there will be a slight delay to some in receiving the reprint of FORTUNE'S article but all will receive their copies as quickly as possible.

DANIEL LONGWELL

Doubleday, Doran & Co.

Garden City, N. Y.

Pogroms & Passports Sirs:

We note in a recent issue of TIME a very forceful comment upon the investigation of foreign propaganda activities in the U. S. [April 2].

Amongst other statements made is one to the effect that the nearest parallel to such investigation occurred in 1911. You state that ''outraged by stories of pogroms by Tsar Nicholas' whip-wielding Cossacks, the House of Representatives passed a measure repealing the Russian-U. S. trade agreement." Is this not an erroneous statement and is it not true that the Russian trade treaty was abrogated because of Russia's refusal to recognize the passport rights of American citizens? The situation came to an issue because American citizens of Jewish faith had their passport privileges negated particularly because of that Jewish faith. . . .

RICHARD E. GUTSTADT

Director

Anti-Defamation League

Chicago, Ill.

Reader Gutstadt is correct. The trade agreement was abrogated because Russia refused to honor U. S. passports presented by Jews, Catholic priests, Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries.--ED.

Pensions & Presumptives

Sirs:

Your issue of April 9 states that the Economy Act of 1933 "authorized the President to ... weed out [veterans] who were drawing compensation for injuries not even remotely connected with the War," and it then proceeds to discuss the Senate's action in overriding the President's veto on the apparent assumption that only such limited ''weeding out" had been done. Nothing could be further from the truth. Had this been the extent to which Administration action went on veterans' compensation there never would have been a back-fire in Congress, nor any public demand for restoration of the benefits cut off.

It is one thing to survey the veterans' problem from a cold statistical viewpoint, but quite something else to know intimately the history of hundreds of cases affected by regulations issued under this law and to observe the wholesale injustices worked thereby. Special Review boards which considered the presumptive cases would have had a light task had they been concerned only with ''injuries not even remotely connected with the War. . . ."

In fact the presumptive cases include thousands of veterans who can trace their disabilities directly to service origin, and present unimpeachable proof thereof. But variations in post-War employment conditions, loss of records through death of physicians, inability to locate witnesses known 15 years ago, and other normal factors complicate the problem of proof for many men. The regulations adopted under the 1933 Economy Act very virtuously read that the benefit of a reasonable doubt, on such proof as was presented, should go to the veteran; but other clauses so restricted the application of this rule that its interpretation resulted in a 60% spread in the action of boards in different States: and the Appeal board in Washington very frankly reversed the formula and attempted to make the veteran prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is need for economy in Government expenditures, and quite probably there are some veterans drawing compensation for injuries not connected with War service. But the promulgation of shotgun regulations which so largely harm the deserving would not seem to be a proper method for effecting reform. . .

I am a veteran, but not as yet a disabled one, and hence not personally affected by this legislation. My service on the Special Review board in Arizona, however, gave me, and would give any fair-minded man, the conviction that justice to the disabled and deserving veterans as a class was not possible under the regulations adopted.

F. E. THOMAS

Tucson, Ariz.

Cord Out of Northwest

Sirs:

SUGGEST YOU CORRECT STATEMENT ON P. 24, THIRD COLUMN THAT "CORD OWNS A FAT SLICE OF NORTHWEST AIRWAYS." AT THE TIME NORTHWEST AIRWAYS AIR MAIL CONTRACTS WERE CANCELLED NONE OF ITS STOCK WAS OWNED BY ANY OTHER AVIATION INTEREST. BOTH CORD AND TRANSCONTINENTAL WESTERN AIR HAD SOLD BACK TO US THEIR HOLDINGS IN OUR COMPANY QUITE A WHILE BEFORE CANCELLATION. THANKS.

L. H. BRITTIN

Northwest Airways, Inc.

Washington, D. C.

Rev. Smith Flayed

Sirs:

As a Mississippian, I offer no defense for the manner in which the Hernando hangings were conducted (TIME, March 26). . . .

As a Mississippian, I do resent the unwarranted insults heaped upon the South in general and Mississippi in particular as a result of these hangings (TIME, April 16, Letters), particularly those of one A. J. Smith. . . .

Unlike [Maryland, Missouri and California], Mississippi marshaled her forces for law and order, gave those accused of the crime a fair and impartial trial, and carried out the decrees of the court in an orderly and efficient manner. . . .

The aforementioned A. J. Smith, who claims affinity with the cloth . . . suggests that since the heathen are not taking very kindly to the brand of gospel which he espouses (and why should they!?), it might be wise to recall the missionaries of his church from their foreign meddling, reconsign the heathen to hell and concentrate on the salvation of Mississippi. . . .

However, let them come. Mississippi has endured worse! And if, perchance, the Rev. Smith be among them, Mississippi will, I venture to say, turn the other cheek by extending to him a brand of hospitality to which, by virtue of the evangelical qualities of his letter, he is not entitled. . . .

C. SESSIONS FANT

Sanatorium, Miss.

. . . Your deluded parson is evidently the least common denominator in a feeble-minded colony, so it is incumbent upon you, because of your profligate journalism, to first sympathetically bridle, then lead that braying charge out of the wilderness, and tell him that only an illiterate native of Montana would know as little as he does of the progress and culture of the commonwealth of Mississippi.

W. H. Cox

Jackson, Miss.

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