Journalists' Quarrel

Some readers of syndicated columns, after sampling the scissors & knives of Dorothy Thompson, Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, turn to Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day for healing and balm. To some other readers, the President's wife seems the Pollyanna of columnists. Even when, last fortnight, she reproved Dramatic Critics Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times and Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune for their blunt dismissal of Save Me the Waltz, a short-lived, Graustark-under-a-dictator romance, it was still in the spirit of loving the sunshine. Critics Atkinson and Watts, wrote Columnist Roosevelt, "seemed to infer that because this play does not teach a great lesson or pick any particular people to pieces, it is worthless as a play."

Simultaneously reproved, this week Critics Watts and Atkinson simultaneously retorted. Critic Watts suggested that Fascism is no matinee-chocolates matter. Critic Atkinson challenged Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic criticism in general. He relished her description of Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance (TIME, Feb. 7) as "whimsical and charming." He caught her misnaming the Federal Theatre's ". . . one-third of a nation." He used her confession that Thornton Wilder's Our Town (TIME, Feb. 14) had "depressed her beyond words," as a way of begging the White House to back good plays "to the last typewriter in the family."

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