Monday, Dec. 26, 1938
Lynching Story
Sirs:
I most emphatically protest against your smugly approving attitude in the lynching story on p. 13, Dec. 5 issue of TIME, as manifested in the following quotations: "The folks of Wiggins, Miss., a quiet sawmill town, have no unusual thirst for Negro blood. They simply know what must be done when a Negro rapes." ". . . They just strung him up in the woods. They didn't shoot or burn his body." Do "they" merit medals in addition to your implied commendation for their failure to shoot or burn the body of their victim after murdering him ? TIME never lets the opinions of its presumably opinionless editors creep into its columns. Perish the thought!
HENRY DUEL
Chicago, Ill.
P.S. The italics in the quotations are mine.
P.P.S. I am not a Negro.
Sirs:
. . . You close the account of the lynching with these words: "-- they just strung him up in the woods. They didn't shoot or burn the body." Is this irony--or an accolade?
CHARLOTTE ATWOOD
New York City
> TIME attempted an ironic shot, but the powder was damp.--ED.
Unreasonable Reason
Sirs:
For the same unreasonable reason that the Athenian voter was bored by hearing Aristides called the Just, I am beginning to feel bored with hearing of the iniquities of Adolf Hitler.
J. P. DUNN
S. S. Dorothy
Baltimore, Md.
Just Suppose
Sirs:
. . . I want it thoroughly understood that I have never been in the game about which I inquire. Just suppose that a man or a set of men should successfully kidnap, say, one or two or three national figures in a certain European country, and land in another European country, or still be more successful and cross the Atlantic and land in the U. S., be arrested and incarcerated for the above deed, do you think public sentiment would be strong enough from the Chief Executive of this nation or those who are in position to use the executive power, that these said parties would not have to serve time in a Federal prison, or do you think he or they would be pardoned? I ask you this, Mr. Editor, in all earnestness, and trust you will favor me with a reply as soon as possible, either in open letter or private as you judge would be wise.
DR. E. E. HEFLIN
[Ex-Member]
State Board of Dental Examiners
Oklahoma City, Okla.
> TIME advises Dentist Heflin to mind his molars.--ED.
Anti-German Bonfires
Sirs:
The plea of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks (TIME, Dec. 5) for anti-German bonfires must be both depressing and alarming to those who believe in democracy . . . depressing that one of our most educated citizens should think in terms of bonfires; alarming that he should publicly recommend "the language of bonfires" to the American people as a means of communication. His excuse for the adoption of such a "language"--that the German people can understand no other--is a metaphor that exceeds poetic license. . . .
We may be thankful that Mr. Brooks's second paragraph does much to invalidate his first: those "millions of good Germans" that he concedes, whose feelings we should spare. Obviously, these people have a perfectly good language; their trouble is not that they cannot understand, but that they cannot hear the right things. Everyone knows that the German people hear only what it pleases the present German leaders that they should hear. An American bonfire of broken German toys would be reported to them as an orgiastic destruction of Aryan art treasures by American Jews, and thus one more step would be taken in the disillusionment of those "good Germans" who still believe there are nations who have outgrown bonfires. . . .
ALBERT R. ERSKINE JR.
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, La.
Sirs:
I have just finished reading Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's highly disgusting and outrageous letter. . . .
One is reminded of the ultra-absurdities of the World War when the word "liberty-kraut" was substituted for sauerkraut by superpatriots in America. As an anti-Hitler American of German descent living in a predominantly German city, I felt it my duty to let the editors of TIME know that no self-respecting German Christian could swallow Mr. Brooks's screamingly false statements without a protest.
PAT GEISENHOFF
St. Paul, Minn.
Sirs:
Van Wyck Brooks wrote to you: "Let the fair play of Americans be trusted to see that the odium falls only upon Germans in high places." Very good,'but his bonfires are first cousins to boycotts, and a boycott is substantially an act of war.
WINSLOW AMES
New London, Conn.
Sirs:
Though I have high respect for Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's literary judgments, I confess I have nothing better than doubts about the anti-Nazi bonfires suggested by him in your issue for Dec. 5. Would such blazes do much but heat our own indignation? True, they might succeed, through the notorious German press, in stirring both resentment and ridicule over there. And just what good would that do the persecuted Jews?
When will our intellectual leaders learn the hard practical truth that evil is never overcome by evil or folly, that revenge merely satisfies the animal in us and intensifies the wrongdoing. How much, for instance, would lynching conditions in our own South be improved if our good neighbor Canada should decide to burn all her U. S.-made articles in protest against our officially countenanced barbarism? Would such a stunt bring us to our senses or anger us ? ...
ROBERT G. BERKELMAN
Professor
Department of English
Bates College
Lewiston, Me.
Blackjacked Poet
Sirs:
In regard to the item you carried about my trouble in TIME Magazine [TIME, Nov. 7], it has been rumored here that I sent this news to your magazine for publication! How absurd this is! I can truthfully say I never sent publicity to a magazine or a newspaper in my life unless I was asked for it. I've never answered a critical book review. I feel like I've had my 'say' in the book and the reviewer is entitled to express his opinion. But when a constable hits me three times over the head with a blackjack when my head is turned is something I don't derive profit from. It is something I can't get over easily!
To be frank with you, I was hit because I expressed my opinion about local conditions, in a local paper. I expressed my opinions then and I'll express them again! The blood of my people has been shed in three American wars that America might be a free country and I sure as hell will carry on that tradition. Three people came to me and told me not to start a newspaper. I wondered why! Now, I know why! "It is dangerous for your reputation," one said. I say to hell with a reputation (what is a reputation?) when a person can't open his mouth!
One other thing to get straight is the talk about me leaving Kentucky by being driven out because I was hit with a blackjack! I'm not leaving Kentucky until I get good and ready to go. Kentucky is my home. I love Kentucky. I was born here. I've lived here among these hills in W-Hollow nearly all my life--with the exception of the years I spent in Tennessee in college and a year abroad. Despite the fact I've been sued for $75,000 I owe a lot of people in Greenup County and it is to their interest to see that I stay until I get my debts paid in full. Petty politicians and constables with blackjacks are not running me out either.
JESSE STUART
Portsmouth, Ohio
Upstart Breed
Sirs:
On p. 69 of the Dec. 12 issue of TIME there is a discussion of Aberdeen-Angus cattle in which the breed is described as the "most upstart of all U. S. cattle breeds." If by this phrase the writer meant that the Aberdeen-Angus was the latest of the recognized beef breeds to become established in the U. S., the statement is true; but so far as concerns Scotland, which is the birthplace of the breed, there are legal documents to show that there were black polled cattle in Aberdeenshire over 400 years ago, in 1523 (Macdonald & Sinclair's "History of Aberdeen-Angus Cattle," 1910 edition, p. 38).
William McCombie of Tillyfour, while by no means the first to set out to improve this old breed, is the most famous of the earlier breeders, largely because of his spectacular winnings at the Paris Exposition of 1878. Incidentally, he began mating cattle in accordance with his theory of linebreeding not a "few years before," but 48 years before, in 1830.
The point is that the Aberdeen-Angus breed has its origin in "time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," and is the carrier of dominant characteristics of a kind desirable in a breed of beef cattle, intensified by a longer period of breeding like to like than is the case with other beef breeds. . . .
WALTER B. CONGDON
Duluth, Minn.
Breed Cattleman Congdon slightly exaggerates the antiquity of his be loved breed. True, there have been black, hornless cattle in northeastern Scotland from time immemorial--but, says James R. Barclay, Secretary of the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society, the beginning of the "breed improvement . . . which was to have its out come in the present-day Aberdeen-Angus breed of cattle . . . was about one hundred and thirty years ago, to be exact, in the year 1808."--ED.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.