Coincidence

Sirs:

Again TIME is to be commended for excellent reporting. I am writing in regard to the article on Donald Douglas and his latest creation [TIME. May 23]. . . .

For some time, I have thought it a good and logical corollary of TIME'S support of our exciting air growth to support a program for the development of a "safety spirit" among potential airplane passengers. It is no mystery that there exists today the prevalent and discouraging belief that planes are still dangerous. Why couldn't TIME take the lead in dispelling this blight on progress? If any organ can do it, you can. go to it!

SAMUEL W. WHITE JR. '40

Harvard College. Cambridge, Mass.

Sirs :

Herewith a charred frontispiece of the May 23 issue of TIME. This may be of interest to you from the following:

This cover, showing a color photograph of TIME'S "Man of the Week"--Donald Wills Douglas--was picked up by the writer beside the badly burned wreckage of a United Air Lines, Douglas-built "Mainliner" which crashed near Cleveland the night of May 24 with a loss of ten lives. This seems to me a rather extraordinary coincidence--a Douglas-built plane, TIME'S feature article on Douglas and the fact that a copy of TIME rode to disaster with this ill-fated group. . . .

R. E. BIRD

Rocky River, Ohio

P96

Sirs:

REGARDING P-96'S PERPETUAL SUBSCRIPTION {TIME, MAY 9, 16}, UNLESS PROPOSITION IS A JOKE, WILL GLADLY TRADE SATURDAY EVENING POST, FORTUNE AND READER'S DIGEST WITH A SWELL HUNTING DOG OR A GOOD-LOOKING WIFE TO BOOT, OTHERWISE WILL PAY ORIGINAL PRICE

E. T. CHALMER

St. Louis, Mo.

Sirs:

As a matter of one more try at it, will you suggest to the owner, P-96, payment of $60 plus one year's subscription, with an option to him personally to buy it back at the end of one year at that price, if his conditions have improved so that he doesn't have to permanently give it up.

HENRY M. BROOKS

Greenwich, Conn.

P-96's perpetual TIME subscription has been sold to Leonard Lee (TIME, May 16), who offered the original price, $60. -- ED.

Liberals, Cont'd

Your invitation in TIME'S flyspeck-nailing department for the brethren to send in their definitions of the word "liberal" and appraisals of its application to Franklin ("The Heart") Roosevelt [TIME, May 9 et seq] ought to bring down on you more echoing bathos than has been heard since the last Fireside Chat.

TIME knows--or by this time should suspect--that these words, liberal, conservative and reactionary, have become blab sounds pure and simple. . . .

Roosevelt a liberal? Pfuey! Not even appraised by the flimsy connotations which still cling to the word is he one. He is a rock-ribbed conservative when the reference is to his own, to what he has struggled to get hold of; and so is every other man. So is John L. Lewis, so is Browder. Each and every one of them has on occasion clawed and bitten and beat the stairs, yelling foul, when thoughtless "liberals" have sought to divide up their powers, perquisites and glories. If there is any meaning left in the word "liberal," 1938 style, it signifies someone who is eager to divide and disperse something belonging to someone else, but just as conservative as the next man when his own store of hard metal, political pelf or public glory is invaded. . . .

JAMES ASWELL

Venice, Fla.

Sirs: . . . F.D.R. a liberal? Yes.

A liberal being one with both eyes open to see that an auto moves faster than an oxcart, that trees grow better in sunlight, that all men are not created free and equal.

LINDSEY C. FOSTER

Pennsboro, W. Va.

Sirs: ... I think President Roosevelt is biased and is a radical.

I was a liberal, now I am confused and do not know what I am. . . .

GEO. FABER

San Antonio, Texas

Sirs:

Reader McArdle's letter about "Liberals" touches upon a sore point in word-usage What is a "liberal?" No simple definition can be very satisfactory. . . .

. . President Roosevelt is a liberal when he speaks, but, since the net result of his actions is demonstrably to strengthen the controls of government over the actions of individuals, he is not a liberal in any sense that has really historic significance. . . .

. The chief distinction in politics is that between men-who-have-power and men -who -want -to -have -power. In that bracket there can be no dispute as to where Mr. Roosevelt stands. At the present moment he is "in."

MAURICE C. LATTA

School of History Olivet College Olivet, Mich.

Sirs:

A liberal is one who believes that the only way to avoid having a highly centralized government is to have one, and usually goes round in circles trying to prove his riddle.

FRANK G. DICKINSON

Clearwater, Fla.

Poor to Paris

Sirs:

TIME is to be commended and congratulated on its alert, comprehensive art reviews, which bring the man in the street into museums and art galleries.

TIME, May 23, however, your reviewer slipped up on one small but important detail in his article on the large Exhibition of American Art 1609--1938 which the Museum of Modern Art assembled at the request of the French Government for a summer showing in the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. After outlining and analyzing with swift clarity the scope of the exhibition, your reviewer states in the caption under your color reproduction of Henry Varnum Poor's Boy with Bow that the artist is not represented in the Paris show.

This is an error. Mr. Poor's painting The Disappointed Fisherman is one of the 119 pictures by 90 contemporary American artists shown in the exhibition.

THOMAS DABNEY MABRY JR.

Executive Director

The Museum of Modern Art New York City

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